Aero expert explains why Mercedes' stunning move is LEGAL...for now

The 2024 season has arrived - and with it, a chance to look at what teams have been working on over the winter.

While Adrian Newey and Red Bull Racing have caught the entire grid off guard by choosing to move away from an aerodynamic concept that made RB19 the most dominant car in F1, Mercedes haven't sat back watching their rivals, and have pushed the boundaries of the current regulations in their own way.

In this feature let us understand why the Mercedes front wing might be the second biggest innovation on the grid this year.

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F1 front wings explained

The front wing is not just a downforce-producing element on an F1 car, it's also primarily responsible for managing the flow to the rest of the car and managing the tyre wake.

With their creative and cheeky interpretation of the front wing regulations, Mercedes has been able to introduce a shedding edge on the element 4 flap, which would result in a vortex as shown in the image above.

Why is this important? Because this vortex can be explicitly used to push the wake of the tyre outboard, which would provide additional higher energy airflow into the floor, especially in the yaw conditions to generate more downforce.

Additionally, for the aero geeks, this would add more downwash on the floor's leading edge, resulting in an increase in downforce from the front half of the floor and also powering up all the vortex structures inside the floor channels. These mechanisms would result in a significant amount of downforce throughout almost all the attitudes of the car, which is why I believe it's a very significant innovation.

Could Mercedes' wing be illegal?

Well, according to the technical regulations as they're currently written, this front wing is legal and is cleared by the FIA. Mercedes must have consulted the regulatory body before spending money on developing and manufacturing this front wing. However, what it doesn't comply with is the spirit of the regulations.

But what is the spirit of the regulations? For an engineer, it's a backdoor for the FIA to shut any design down if they want to. For FIA this means anything that provides a significant biased advantage (DAS system) or makes overtaking worse (remember, 2022 was all about improving overtaking).

By using the tip vortex and pushing the tyre wake outboard Mercedes is essentially replicating aero mechanisms used in pre-2022 regulations, and thus the only argument against this design is that it might not be in the 'spirit of the regulations'.

Will this be deemed illegal?

While the wing is currently legal, there are two ways in which it can be deemed otherwise. Firstly, if one of the teams protests against it and wins - pretty simple stuff. The second way is if the design starts popping up on other cars as well, in which case the FIA would surely step in to ban this as it would go against the spirit of the regulation.

Looking at the aero mechanisms of this front wing, I suspect that it can be integrated by the teams within their current aero philosophy, i.e. if the benefits are obvious then you might see these front wings on other teams as early as Race 6. If not banned this year, the ban would likely come via a technical directive for next year.

Potential outcomes

Looking at the testing times, especially the long runs, the RB20 in the hands of 3-time world champion Max Verstappen looks very formidable. Innovations like this front wing are exactly what could help Mercedes close the huge gap to their biggest rivals. If all the initial correlations work out well from testing, Mercedes might have just opened an entirely new area of development on the car.

Shubham Sangodkar is a former F1 Aerodynamicist with a Master's in Racing Car Design specialising in F1 Aerodynamics and F1 Data Analysis. He also posts aerodynamics content on his YouTube channel, which can be found here.

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