"don't like the high noses, oversized front wings and why on earth are the front and rear tyres virtually the same size. So uncool!"
So long as your expectations are based on 'cool' rather than technology, you will be disappointed.
The High nose is required because the 'standard' car design creates an area of high pressure just behind the front of the car. If you look at 'old' cars, like the Ford Capri for example, you can see how the cars used to rise up on this pressure wave at high speed. In a formula 1 car approaching 200mph, the front of the car would float off the ground, as amply demonstrated in the past when cars have flipped for no apparent reason.
Secondly, you are sadly out in your evaluation of ground effect cars. The first real ground effect race car was the Chapparal 2J, of 1970, the 'sucker' with a fan driven by a separate engine. The Lotus 79 didn't come out till 1979 and its trick was to drive the sucker from the main engine rather than the auxiliary claiming that as only 49% of the fan power was used to suck, its primary purpose (51%) was cooling!
Th Chapparal was the original "stick to the roof of a tunnel" car.
Big front wings are needed to balance the car (thanks to those pressure effects earlier) because the high heat exchange and large petrol tanks require a large mid section that tends to float the whole car off the ground. When you get round to really fast cars (Thrust 2 for example) there are huge problems getting the car to stay on the ground because of the ground effect.
Pitch sensitive rear wings? Do you mean they are sensitive to changes in the angle of the car or can be adjusted for greater pitch in the pits?
Large rear wings are necessary to keep the car on the ground. Sure, you can design the cars without the rear wing, but then you limit the effective speed to the 140mph you mention rather than the 200 mph of today. F1 survives on its reputation as the fastest, most advanced racing cars of the day. If they are 10's of MPH slower than, say, the IndyCars, then they've lost the appeal of being the fastest general racing formula.
It's also possible to do a comnplete redesign of the car, replacing many of the current limitations with different rules that do the same thing in a different way. Head's designs doesn't get rid of aerodynamics, it gets rid of the F1 rules that demand that the aerodynamics are done 'that way'. eg: if you allow underbody suction and side skirts, you can do away with rear wings. What you cannot do away with is downforce.
The problem you have to solve with underbody suction etc, is reliability. Under certain conditions, if the body gets too close to the ground, underbody downforce disappears completely, which is a bit of an embarrassment when it happens during the braking period, the period when the cars squat closest to the ground. How many F1 cars burrowning into the tyre wall at 200 mph would it take to wish rear wings back again?
I agree with you that the era of great visual car control was several decades ago. There are videos of drivers overtaking under full opposite lock which are entertaining in a way current cars cannot emulate. The trouble is the limiting speeds are 60mph slower.
one of the reasons people watch MotoGP is because the skills of the driver are obvious on the fastet bikes available. The fact that the drivers migrate round teh different bike classes proves that it isn't just the driver, it's the bike as well. Emasculating F1 would reduce it to the status of British SuperBikes.
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Good riddence to the current F1 car design...... by 'Moonshine' (02 Jan 2011 @ 13:47)
