The F-Duct
In terms of the actual construction of an F1 car, the original rules were pretty simple: make something with 4 wheels that will go around a circuit in the fastest way possible. However, with drivers dropping like flies in the early years of F1, certain rules and regulations obviously had to be put in place in order to keep the drivers and spectators safe, as well as to keep the teams on a relatively even playing field.
Over time, rules have become increasingly strict, and it shows – most F1 cars these days are very difficult to tell apart if it weren’t for their distinctive paint schemes. In other words, every car on the grid more or less looks the same to the untrained eye. This is where the ingenuity of F1’s designers and engineers comes to the fore – where they read the rules for the upcoming year, and then re-read them in order to get an understanding as to how they can exploit them.
In this edition we’ll be looking at the “F-Duct”, a pretty nifty component pioneered by McLaren back in 2010 for their MP4-25 model.
Background
In Formula 1, being competitive more often than not comes down to tiny margins: being 2 kph faster through a corner… 4 kph faster on the straight… etc. All of these tiny margins tend to add up and separate the faster cars from the slower ones.
In 2010, the brainy bunch at McLaren spotted a loophole in the regulations. Teams at that stage were not allowed any kind of moveable aerodynamic components on their cars. That word in italics gave the game away, and McLaren’s engineering team got straight to work on their aerodynamic solution for 2010.
What is it? What does it do?
The F-Duct was a small, snorkel-like vent installed in the nose of the McLaren, which was connected to a ducting system that would channel air through the inside of the car. This duct had a small opening in the driver’s cockpit, which the driver could seal off using their left (ie. Braking) leg. By sealing this opening, the air would be channeled to the rear of the car, and blown out of a slot in the bodywork just in front of the rear wing. This would cause the rear wing to be placed in an aerodynamic stall, which means that the amount of downforce (and subsequent drag) produced by the rear wing would be greatly reduced. This was 100% in line with the rules and regulations, too, as the component was definitely not moveable, though it WAS deployable.
Therefore, the driver would plug the hole in the cockpit while on a straight in order to maximize their straight-line speed. Then, when they needed to slow down, they’d just have to hit the brakes, which would break the seal in the cockpit, and normal airflow would resume to the rear wing, slowing the car down faster.
Why it’s awesome
The reduction in drag meant that the 2010 McLaren had, by some margin, the fastest car on the straights – at some circuits, the car was clocked as being over 9 km/h faster than the others. Other teams were quick to introduce their own versions of the F-Duct (after initially complaining about it to the authorities), but because McLaren had started development on their special duct earlier than the competition, and thus had more time to test and optimize it, they had the most effective duct.
McLaren had by no means the best car overall in 2010, with Red Bull’s RB6 taking almost every Pole Position that year, but the extra top speed granted by McLaren’s F-Duct allowed Lewis Hamilton to take McLaren’s only Pole in Canada that year – at a circuit that demands high top speeds. He won that race, too!
Sadly, the F-Duct concept (at least in this iteration) would be banned from 2011 onwards; though DRS was implemented across all teams in its place, which has an even bigger effect on top speeds. Would we have seen DRS without McLaren’s ingenuity? We’ll probably never know!