Gary Anderson, former race car designer and now technical expert for The Race, has analyzed the technical decisions that have allowed AlphaTauri to progress at this stage of the season.
AlphaTauri is in last place, 10th in the Constructors’ Championship, with just five points to its name. Not what was expected in 2023 from a team similar to Red Bull Racing, which dominates the championship, except that it had some problems in Singapore.
However, in the last few races the Italian team has improved, with the riders already reaching the final qualifying rounds and competing for places in the top ten.
AplhaTauri’s cars have generally lacked aerodynamic efficiency this year and the team has been unable to get the AT04 chassis to generate consistent downforce across the entire ride height range. There were also obvious problems with the behavior of the car in corners at slow and medium speed – at the late stage of entry, stability was lost.
A number of technical innovations have made it possible to solve these problems, mainly by increasing downforce without losing overall chassis efficiency.
In Singapore the team introduced a fairly extensive set of small improvements, and all together they helped make the AT04 more competitive.
The geometry of that part of the floor in front of the rear wheels has changed slightly. You can’t just force the airflow to go wherever you want it to go; you need to create areas of low pressure where you want. If you do this correctly, you can, as experts often say, properly organize the “aerodynamic structure of the flow” flowing around the car.
Guide baffles or splitters, located near the front of the bottom, deflect the flow to the sides, after which it is drawn into the low-pressure area created by the chamfers at the bottom of the side pontoons. In this case, vortices are formed and gain energy as they move along the outer edge of the bottom.
The strengthening of such vertebrae is facilitated by the special shape of this part of the bottom. The previous version of the aerodynamic body kit AT04 was wider, which made it difficult to direct the flow to the narrow space between the body and the rear tire. In addition, the small tunnel, which is located within the edge of the bottom, has become longer – it now extends much further forward – creating a locally low-pressure area, which allows to contain the vortex, which at its turn helps to aerodynamically seal the edges of the bottom.
The shape of the upper surface of the side pontoons has also been changed and the team also brought a modernized rear wing to Suzuka. At Zandvoort I noticed a solution proposed by McLaren: on the MCL60 the shape of the outer edges of the movable plane of the rear wing had changed slightly. I then said it would be interesting to see when other teams follow suit.
On all circuits except Monaco you are always trying to improve the efficiency of every part of the car, and that was exactly the case. In this case, small losses of downforce are possible, but the outer edge of the wing’s moving plane is least involved in their creation.
Before McLaren offered their interpretation of this part of the car, a vortex formed there, essentially “dragging” the car behind them. With this solution, a small vortex is also formed at the edge of the moving plane of the wing, but it is located more below this plane and not towards the inner surface of the end plate, as before.
This small improvement made by AlphaTauri between Singapore and Suzuka has made the AT04’s aerodynamics slightly more efficient, suiting the characteristics of the Japanese circuit.
As a result of all these measures, AlphaTauri’s car improved at both Marina Bay and Suzuka, although these are two completely different circuits. We can therefore expect the Faenza team riders to compete for points in all remaining stages of the season.
The only question is whether this will be enough to allow the team to rise at least a little higher from the bottom line of the Constructors’ Championship and actually become another contender fighting for 7th place in the team standings, as Williams only has 16 points has been removed from AlphaTauri.
Source: F1 News
I am Christopher Clyde, an experienced journalist and content writer with a passion for sports. I have been writing about Formula 1 news for the past five years and am currently employed as an author at athletistic.com, one of the top sports websites in the US.
