What If Formula 1 Had No Rules?

Intro what if there were no rules in F1 how fast could the cars go what would the engineers change and could the drivers actually survive F1 or Motorsport with no rules is something that Engineers dream about and the questions have been asked before but there must be some rules there must be somewhere for the driver to sit there must be four wheels the laws of physics must be followed and the cars must be optimized for a lap time around a Formula 1 circuit like Silverstone or spark so before we get into how we developed a no roll car and how fast it might go let's take a minute to look at what's been dreamt up already first up the Volkswagen IDR Pikes Peak a 671 horsepower electric motored monster that owns the fastest time up the legendary Pikes Peak Hill Climb at 7 minutes and 57 seconds yes the car is extremely fast it has to be to have the record at Pike's Peak but it's still a bit overweight at 1100 kgs and ultimately is not 100% focused on aerodynamic performance as described here by the very aerodynamic looking head of exterior design car has to look juicy nice sexy uh desirable and that's our job you know aerodynamic of course is something important but the design is at the end this is what matters then we have the Porsche 919 Evo which is what happens when Porsche's Engineers take an already very successful race car and then up the roll book it has more downforce from a flatter front nose a wider rear wing and a larger diffuser and while we're talking about Arrow it also was able to move parts to generate more downforce and then remove drag apparently generating 50% more down Force than the 919 race car Engineers also added lightness by removing about 40 kg by getting rid of non-essential Parts like headlights and onboard Jacks the car was also able to use more fuel and therefore had more power getting up to 1160 horsepower but still it only had a tiny 2 L V4 engine and I'm sure if that were changed there'd be even more power available and then we have the brain children of Adrian Nei and probably the designs that we have to take the most seriously for this video where the Volkswagen had to look good and be all corporate and the Porsche was an adaptation of an existing race car Red Bulls X20 and x204 are purely focused on lap time granted the likely never be built but they have been designed from zero with speed around a racetrack being the North Star the first X20 concept uses a forced induction 1480 horsepower engine that theoretically could achieve a top speed of 292 mph and a maximum lateral turning load of 6G I mean the car looks very cool first of all but uh you know it's very good to drive as well but Nei being an engineer thought he could do better and decided Ed to add a fan to the car to help the grip in the low and medium speed Corners where there isn't enough air flowing over the car for it to create the downforce itself this is something that AMZ racing focused on with their car that broke the N to 100 km an hour world record accelerating to 100 kph in less than a second which I just made a video about so in theory at least the new car should be able to do 310 mph and pull 8G on the brakes that's around 3G more than a modern F1 car but one of the key things here is that newest car only weighs 545 kg compared to the 800 kg F1 cars are today and the slimness F1 cars haven't been since the early '90s now of course this car was for the Gran Turismo game and I'm unsure of how credible the numbers actually are but the aerodynamic concept is the important thing here and if that has come from Nei we probably should take note what you might not know is that a no rules formula has actually existed in real life in the past it was CanAm called Canam and It produced some of the most awesome cars ever the Can-Am series at RH Atlanta featuring the fastest racing cars in the world with the largest racing engines in use anywhere Canam or the Canadian American challenge cup was a racing series from 1966 to 1975 the regulations were minimal to say the least unlimited engine sizes including allowing turbos and superchargers and virt unrestricted aerodynamics it's basically the closest that any major racing series ever got to having no rules as long as the cars had two seats Wheels enclosed by Bodywork and met some 1970s safety standards you were good to go as you might imagine this allowed Engineers to come up with some genius Solutions and push racing car development more than ever before Canam cars were some of the first racing cars to have wings turbocharging that actually worked ground effect aerodynamics and Aerospace Mater materials like titanium all of which are common place in Motorsport today it really was a development bed for engineers and that's what I love but unfortunately as you might imagine all this development led to Rising costs and the eventual downfall of the series however there was a period where Canam cars were often as fast if not faster than the Formula 1 cars of the time so with all this Freedom what kind of cars did Canam produce well the first mention goes to the Porche 917 30 KL from 1972 And this thing was an absolute monster a 5.4 L flat2 1100 horsepower in RAC trim and there's more it actually produced 1580 horsepower in qualifying trim just look at how much fun this car must have been eventually though the Porsche was restricted with Regulators enforcing a fuel consumption rule for 1974 however like with the 919 Evo Porsche then used the car to break some records with it breaking the close course speed world record at 221 mph at Talladega Speedway and it reached 240 mph on the straights Mark donu established a new world record Mark at Alabama 22116 mil per hour Canam can also be thanked for bringing ground effects into Motorsport with the chaperel 2J now you've probably seen this weird looking car before famous as it had a massive fan on the back but I'll leave it to Sir Sterling moss and the designer Jim Hall to explain the technical side this is the fan that helps suck the car downwards what's this plastic skirt well the skirts a seal to maintain the vacuum under the car it's made of lexand so it will stand a 200 mph impact this was groundbreaking it had two fans adapted from a military tank driven by a two-stroke engine and who does like tanks and a two-stroke the 2J competed in the 1970 season and qualified at least 2 seconds quicker than the next car but being rather complex it did break quite a lot and unfortunately it was again outlawed by the organizers but the concept did manage to make its way into Formula 1 with Bernie echelon's Bram team and the Gordon Murray designed bt46b speaking of engineering genius if you'd like to start your journey to becoming the next Edan Nei you should check out today sponsor brilliant.org brilliant is the best way to learn more about engineering that doesn't take years of schooling it's free and easy to understand they're the best way to learn maths data science and computer science interactively brilliant is built for busy people you can learn anywhere anytime on your phone tablet or computer and master big Concepts in as little as 15 minutes a day and so their bite-sized lessons make it easy to build a daily habit there are over 100 courses with thousands of lessons and new content added monthly so you can stay up toate with the latest Concepts behind world changing technology so if you want to try everything brilliant has to offer for free for 30 days then visit brilliant.org driver61 or click on the link in the description the first 200 of you will get 20% off brilliant annual premium subscription so we've decided to take on this project but where do we focus our attention well there are five main areas to work on aerodynamics power weight Aerodynamics reduction tires and suspension now there's a lot of improvement we can make but for the scope of this video I'm going to focus on the big one arrow and maybe I'll follow up with another video about what's possible with the engine and the tires now the overall goal is to create a car with more downforce and less drag more downforce means later braking higher cornering speeds and better traction less drag means we can go faster on the straight bits so how should we approach this should the car look like an F1 car or more like a prototype car or should it just be a big vacuum cleaner like the 2J from earlier and does it need to have lots of pointy bits like a 2008 F1 car but does it need to be smooth and rounded like the Volkswagon IDR well I recently had willm toer on the driver 61 podcast to help me understand more and first he explained a little bit about f1's Arrow rules the aerodynamic rules are also quite restrictive you have CAD files you have to follow where you're allowed Bodywork in a certain Zone if they took those dimensional restrictions away way you would be able to add quite a significant amount of organic downforce to to give you more aerodynamic power so basically F1 forc designers to work within a set of predefined areas and they can't go outside of these therefore the basic shape of an F1 car is defined by the r makers and Before We complain too much there is an important reason the engineers want to make a fast car of course but the other thing they want to do is keep other cars behind them and if there weren't any regulations they'd do their very best to create a massive hole in the air behind their car so the cars behind have very little downforce and no one wants to watch racing where there's actually very little racing but what would we actually focus on aerodynamically speaking on our no rules car well of course we'd need to work on the typical areas the front Wing the side pods the floor and the rear wing but with no rules there's much more that we can work on we could use active Arrow wings and arrow parts that move it also doesn't need to be open top like we have it in F1 it doesn't even need to be open wheeled and fans we could use fans like we see in the AMZ racing car and the McMurry spearing but the important thing about arrow is that it all needs to work together there's no point adding a load of downforce to the front Wing if it disrupts the air flowing down the rest of the car so let's start at the front and work our way through the car before we get to the more crazy additions and remember all of this is hypothetical aerodynamicists around the world are still understanding and evolving the theory of aerodynamics it's deliciously complicated so the front wing it would want to be massive in depth something like you'd find on the Empire wraith only a bit bigger but you'd only want the wing to be bigger on its edges and not that large in the middle that way you not making the air work too hard before it goes underneath the floor we want all that air to be moving cleanly under the car through the diffuser as that will create a lot of downforce that's why we saw High noses develop in F1 starting with the tial 019 and being most prominent with the one car from about 2010 before rules changed to lower the noses but the main point of these high noses and basic middle sections of the front Wing was to keep the air tidy for best use under the floor then for our no rolles car the outside of the wing would look similar to the front Wings we saw in F1 in 2018 but maybe not quite as complex and then we have the wheels with regards to Arrow wheels are a pain they're exposed elements that disrupt the air flow around the car unlike the smooth controllable surface on the car's body wheels and tires generate complex turbulent air flows that can reduce overall aerodynamic efficiency and so it's better if we just cover them up fairings in front of the wheels fairings behind the wheels the the wheels would not be truly exposed as with new's X 2014 the wheels would be covered in a fairing to ensure that the air flow is kept under control but remember we also need to call the brakes so William suggests a non-rotating wheel cover so that some air can pass over the brake disc and pads cool them down and then exit in a specific place where the air can then be used down the rest of the car so the floor and this is where Floor things get more simple and also a little bit more complicated if there were no rules the shape of the floor would actually be quite simple if you just focus on getting the best aerodynamic shape which is a simple smooth shape but we can only have that simple shape if the car's ride height is always perfect and today's F1 cars do change ride height dropping at the front under braking squatting at the rear under acceleration rolling in the corners and lowering overall as downforce increases and that's why we see a more complicated floor design in F1 because Engineers have to deal with all of this movement but we have no rules and so we're simply going to opt for active suspension that keeps the car in the perfect attitude at all times and there's more we'll also have Vortex generators at the front of the floor as they can help us eek out a bit more D Force by adding energy to the air rolling up Vortex means you get some higher velocity air and where You' sped the air up locally the pressures on that high speed section are are a little bit lower and so you can use that to get a little bit more downforce out of the air oh and I almost forgot of course we'd use skirts skirts do the best job of sealing the sides of the floor although they can never do it perfectly with less air leaking in there's lower pressure under the back of the floor and so more downforce and grip and finally let's Rear Wing talk about the rear wi before we get on to the active Arrow the fans and the closed cockpit first off you'd want the rear wing to be as wide as possible wider than current F1 rules allow this is because the wider it is the less angle you need to run to get the same amount of downforce and that means less drag like with the X 20104 it's multi-element and would it be the same shape all the way across and this bit is really interesting if you look at the x24 you see the outer parts of the wing have more angle than the central part and this again is because Arrow all needs to work together just think about the air it moves over the top of the car and then hits the rear wing before connecting again with the air coming from under the floor that means that you'd be better off using the middle part of the wing to reduce pressure behind the floor and make the floor even more powerful so of course we already use wings and floors in F1 but what about really exploring no rules well first we'd go with a closed cockpit as it gives a smoother surface and better control over the air flow down the rest of the car it also gives you a stronger structure which means that the engineers would actually just make it lighter and end up having the same strength then we'd have active Arrow movable wings of course this means that you could add Wing in the braking zones and corners and remove it on the Straits you'd also add a movable device in the diffuser that would open at high speeds so then it could have less drag and improve top speed but one of the main benefits of active arrow is that the tires would be more likely to survive going this quickly we haven't spoken about the engine but imagine that a car with no rules might be able to do four or even 500 km an hour the tires are going to be a weak point especially with loads of downforce squashing them into the ground let alone the speed ripping them apart at least with active Arrow the floor and wings could reduce load at high speed and give the tires a bit of a rest okay so what about fans honestly if there are no limits fans fans are the cheat code because natural natural aerodynamics only work when the car has air moving over it so natural aerrow doesn't work from a standing star and is much less effective in slower Corners if you suck the car to the ground with a powered fan you don't need to be moving to create downforce just like the chapero 2J from earlier now Willam tells me that in theory with a fan you can create 10 tons of force for every square meter of surface but of course that's only in theory you still need to find a fan powerful enough to do that and there would be leakages so we couldn't even get close to a vacuum so getting to let's say 30% of a of a vacuum I would say you should be achievable and if we were using fans the design of the entire car would likely change with fans you can put the suction exactly where you want it and could change the handling balance of the car really quickly for example if you turn it into a corner and have some under steer you could just turn up the fan at the front however as the car's speed increases you'd probably rely more on the floor and the wings the reason is that the fans might simply run out of capacity they likely wouldn't be able to remove enough air to create enough suction while the car is moving quickly and this is where we'd need to do more research but it's safe to say that if there were no rules fans would be used in some way in fact there are a number of formul student teams running fans on their car currently so it'll be interesting to see how they develop so we've got our car sorted but would it work on the circuit well probably not it's been estimated that the Red Bull X 2014 could pull up to 8G and so that causes a couple of issues no tire in the world could work with double the downforce of a current F1 car and a 500 km hour top speed so there'd need to be a ton of development and a load of money spent there even if it was possible and then of course there's the driver I've only experienced the heady Heights of 8G in a crash not sustained through a sequence of Corners like o Rouge and yes fighter pilots experience up to8 or 9g for sustained periods but but that's head to toe GeForce not lateral so it can be combed with a git but I think it's safe to say that the driver would struggle with driving a full race D with the height of 8G by the way when researching this I found out that you sneeze at 2.9 G so the next time you have a Cod like I do now remember that you're experiencing the same GeForce as Hamilton when he's turning into Brooklyn's at Silverstone so how much faster would our no rules car be in all honesty I don't know it would require a lot more work and simulation to find out but for now the closest thing we have is a lap around the nurbo gring in the X 2014 on Gran Turismo so what do you think how much faster could this car be and are there any ideas that I've missed out please let me know in the comments this car may be hypothetical but fans have been used on the car to make it Accelerate from 0 to 100 kmph in less than a second I spoke to the team leader of AMZ racing and made a video about it just here thank you very much for watching and I'll see you next time