Up Close With The New 2024 Cars

Up Close With The New 2024 Cars

well the third and final day of preseason testing in Bahrain is with us and it did not start exactly how all the teams would have liked it to have started out a very long red flag period meant that everybody's lunches had been canceled and that's not something the teams like and they also do not like losing all of that running but what I like is the opportunity to see all of the cars back in the garages with quite a lot of the Bodywork removed and I thought we'd take a look at some of those details that are normally hidden now where else to start but with the world champions yep it's Red Bull again but I thought we'd take a detailed look at the front of the car the nose is off the car at this point so we get to see the front bulkhead that's the very front of the monocot the chassis of the car and you can see that right here in clear detail but there are some details on the front of the chassis on that bulkhead that I just want to draw your attention to and I'll just talk them through very quickly before we compare it to that of a different car so you've got these fixing point points at the top and bottom now there's nothing really complicated to those those fixing points are literally just to bolt the nose on they're kind of quick release so you can make a quick pit stop if the driver biffs into something early in the race but that's just the nose fixing point so that's not all that interesting then you've got the brake master cylinder here now Red Bull's only got one there and they relocated the other one the clutch cylinder I forget which way around it's whether the brake cylinder is out the front or the clutch cylinder is further back but one of them is located somewhere else in the leading part of the chassis. we haven't really got good footage of that yet but we will get it and another thing to take a really interesting look at and myself and Craig scare have taken a look at this in the past but it's really interesting to see that red will have carried this over to this year's car the rb20 take a look at this little pipe coming up to the front here that's the driver's drink tube because the drinks tube is located somewhere deep down in the tip of the nose cone now I think Red Bull does that for weight distribution reasons there was some speculation was that the drinks bottle yes I had a look inside the nose cone last season and sure enough both them and RB have the drinks bottle right at the tip of the nose a liter of water maybe a liter and a half of water at the front of the car or I think in Max Ven's case coconut water we saw a couple of seasons ago that has the driver drinks could it balance out the weight distribution through a grand PRI do not know maybe a just driver likes to have cool water from the front tip with that cooling slot said there is no cooling slot on the front of the rb20 yet so maybe that water's getting nice and warm the other thing I want to draw your attention to very quickly is the electrical connector There's sensors in the nose and in the front Wing that's just connected there and when the drivers come in to change their nose because they've had a little accident the team have quick release system so there's a quick release electrical connector there so they can just whip off the nose with a couple of screws of side and put the new one back on then finally let's just take a look at the steering position you can see the steering components down here at the bottom of the chassis now if you'd looked at a F1 car from a few seasons ago you'd have seen the steering position much higher the teams decided a little while ago that they wanted to get the steering positions lower for aerodynamic reasons so the steering arms are located with the lower wishbones that's purely for aerodynamics not for any steering geometries or feel for the driver and you'll see similar designs laid out up and down the pit Lane and as we go down the pit Lane I think we should go and take a look at a car that some people once called a green bill but I do not think that's fair it's the Martin quite a different layout you'll notice the Red Bull we were just looking at is a pull Rod front suspension car this is a push rod front suspension car but actually the front bulkhead on the Aston Martin looks a bit cleaner and their way of arranging those different components is subtly different no driver's drinks bottle on the front of the Aston Martin note they've got their drinks bottle I think behind the driver's seat or underneath their bottom but you can see again a single master cylinder at the front the other master cylinder located somewhere else in the car but then you can see again that low steering position down here just to get that steering arm lower down all about the aerodynamics of the car and Aston Martin has done some quite interesting things around the front suspension just pay quick attention to the way the upper Wishbone droops down out board of the chassis I think we're going to take a detailed look at that later in the season the only other thing I want to draw your attention to on the Aston Martin front bulkhead is remember on the Red Bull you had those protruding bolts coming out in those four locations to put the nose on well a son Martin have done the absolute opposite they've got some holes the bolts are on the back of the nose cone itself they think that's a quicker way to change some those Red Bull don't agree that's slightly different and then just have a quick look here this big hole that is the hole that is fed by the driver cooling duct in the tip of the nose. has nothing to do with the new coming driver cooling duct which would be located on the Aston Martin about there it's not fitted with them in this picture and just to give you a bit bit of an oversight on that let's have a look at another pull rod car it's the McLaren subtly different layout slightly more cluttered on the McLaren which is not something you'd expect compared to the Aston Martin but you can see here quite clearly a massive hole for the driver cooling duct that's in the tip of the nose and we have seen that McLaren's got quite a big hole on the nose tip in Bahrain I wonder if they'll keep that for the rest of the season or will they try something different as the year goes on I suspect they will again low steering position for the McLaren you can see the steering components down here and where they're mounted very low for those aerodynamic reasons and McLaren they've gone as you can see for male attachments on the chassis and the female attachments the holes are on the nose cone itself so the other way around to as Martin and um and as I say keep an eye on the master cylinders McLaren twin Master cylinders on the nose so they've decided to move all of that weight right to the front of the car so let's take a one to actually back up the pit Lane to where we started because one of the reasons that Red Bull was in the garage for a little while with that red flag was that they were having some breaker problems and it gave us an opportunity a little bit of a rare opportunity to have a closer look at the friction material of a Formula 1 car because it's normally buried underneath those cake tins those carbon fiber shrouds that look like tins you put cakes in hence the name and uh you can see here a Formula One car's brake system works just like one on a road car you've got discs and pads but the discs and pads the material are made out of carbon fiber composite essentially it's a bit more complicated than that but we're not going to go into all of that here just thought you'd show you've got the Red Bull front caliper here really clever piece of engineering something we're going to take a look at in a lot more detail later in the season but check out here you can see the brake pads are in position here and numbered inside and outside big chunky brake pads but you'll notice there's no cooling holes on those brake pads because brake pad cooling wiles essentially outlawed a little while ago but then you can see the brake disc up here and they that has a huge amount of drillings I'm not going to count them all because there are thousands in there but five drillings in a diagonal pattern across the width of the brake disc Now teams have a choice of different friction material through the season it comes from different suppliers companies like carbon industry Brembo not sure if this is the Brembo or the carbon industry disc on the Red Bull at the moment. I think it's probably the Brembo but they've been experimenting with both I believe because drivers have different preferences in terms of the way the brakes feel and different circuits and different patterns of those drillings are available to each driver from each manufacturer as well so there is a bit of chopping and changing for the drivers and for the teams with that front brake layout I just thought this was a lovely opportunity to see the braking system of a Formula 1 car and while the mechanics were working at the front end of the Red Bull on the brake system at the rear of the car they took the engine cover off and we just got a very nice glimpse of some of the cooling system on the car we saw on day one those cooling slots behind the driver's shoulder on day two we call saw the cooling exits on the top of the car well on day three we can take a look underneath the Bodywork and you can see that cooling Outlet on the side that's what you saw with that sort of almost jet airliner style cooling Outlet on that side that metal duck they've been playing around with all through the test there's an air outlet you can see the cooler Upstream of it not quite sure yet what is being cooled by that shoulder cooler but that is being fed by those coolers over the driver's shoulders what's being fed by the coolers we haven't seen back here remains to be seen you can just see the top of the uh Honda power unit here the air filter housing just at the top and then the plenum goes down from there and then you can just see one of the coolers in the side pod here sitting very high up and this sort of images has led to a lot of speculation that red bu are going to go zero pod I do not think they are looking looking at the size of these coolers or they're going to have to completely redesign the cooling layout they did do that last year a couple of times so I wouldn't rule it out but it does look like a big job to change it the car's only just been launched of Of course a red flag means you do not just get to look underneath the Bodywork sometimes the Bodywork itself is of interest and down at the Williams Garage at the other end of the pit Lane they introduced a new front Wing we saw this actually on the live coverage a bit but it's got a really interesting design feature you can see it here the dive plane as we call it on this outer edge of the end plate rather than being just a sliver of carbon fiber as we're used to seeing it's a big old wedge of carbon fiber and that's quite unlike anything we've ever seen in this generation of F1 I wonder if other teams are going to take note of that and start copying it Williams of course has got quite a high amount of wind tunnel and cud allowance so maybe they can experiment with a few other things that the current top teams can't do but speaking of a top team experimenting who cannot talk talk about Ferrari when the green light finally camion the Ferrari took to the track and my word did the Italian team have a test program lined up this is the engine cover of the car in the garage during that red flag period now it's pretty pretty clear what I'm going to talk about here you've got this big cooling Outlet on the side of the car and we discussed that over the previous two days of testing and the fact you can see that Ferrari has got an interchangeable panel as all teams do to let them swap these cooling louvers out in and out now you tend to see one or maybe two patterns through the weekend Ferrari ran an asymmetric layout at the start of the test with one cooling Outlet on this side of the car and two on the other and we were going to talk about that and how teams run asymmetric cooling layouts then the car took to the track at the start of the session and uh sure enough it came into the pits and our producers noticed very quickly the car had grown a second cooling lea on the side of the Bodywork so already they tried a second cooling package and there were two cooling lures on the other side Ah that's something nice to talk about in Tech talk we thought let's go in detail that as we were preparing and coming on air we saw the car take to the track and look at that a huge chunk of cooling leas we can play that clip back for you and just have a bit of a closer look but this is what you expect to see from all of the teams through a Race season rather than a preseason test but Ferrari are taking that very seriously look at that they've opened up the panel and I think scope even for more cooling louvers to appear are we going to get to 2022 levels of Ferraris having more gills than the average fish shop not sure but they are really trying their different technical Dev development directions at the moment and I think there's an awful lot more of this to come and that's why I'm really looking forward to the rest of the 2024.