Virgin Racing & CFD
Virgin will be one of the new teams to grace the formula one grid this coming season, with an innovative design technique and the backing of Richard Branson they may just be able to do something spectacular in light of his Brawn success.
Virgin started out as the Manor F1 outfit and quickly got rebranded to Virgin Racing when Richard Branson got involved after the Brawn deal came to an end. Manor’s step up to F1 includes their somewhat odd design approach, no wind tunnel, just CFD – that’s it.
Computational Fluid Dynamics. CFD uses software to model the effects that a fluid – in this case air – will have on the car, it uses some fluid dynamics equations to calculate the effect on each surface in a 3D simulation and then calculates how these forces all work together. It can produce results for downforce and stressing of components both of which are useful to F1 teams, though Virgin are the first team to rely solely on it. All of the other teams have CFD systems but they also use models and windtunnels to confirm it’s findings, they have learnt not to trust the CFD 100%. You need some pretty serious hardware to run these simulations and all the teams have some capacity but I’m guessing Virgin must have access to more than most if it is their sole design methodology. I’d be interested to know if they use CFD as part of a design process or go the whole hog and use learning algorithms to do part of the design – from what I’ve seen that’s not the case though.
Driver wise Virgin have signed Timo Glock and Lucas Di Grassi, Timo Glock has had some pretty solid drives for Toyota but he hasn’t exactly set the world alight in F1 and Di Grassi graduates from GP2 to take up a rookie slot on the grid. It’s not the most exciting or experienced pairing on the grid but Glock at least should be a safe pair of hands that knows how things work.
If their car isn’t let down by the risky design approach then I’d expect Virgin to make a good go of F1, they may have trouble beating Lotus to avoid Richard Branson dressing up but I doubt they will be last either.
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