The Virgin completes it’s first laps
The Virgin Racing VR-01 started it’s shake down at Silverstone today, completing it’s virgin laps. The car looks stunning, in part the colours and in part the design. The question remains though whether their design method will be able to compete with the other teams.
Timo Glock gave the car it’s firt few laps at Silverstone ahead of it’s test in Jerez next week, they’ll do more mileage tomorrow.
I’m still interested to know the design methodology, whether this is a completely human designed car that has been informed by the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) or whether they’ve closed the design loop and let the software – Nick Wirth’s CFDynamo – optimise the design. I know quite a lot about optimisation algorithms and only a few spring to mind that they could use and though the computational power needed would be immense, it is entirely possible. There doesn’t seem to be any information anywhere about this subject though.
Interestingly a quote from the Wirth Research website seems to indicate that CFD isn’t the only answer…
Therefore, to supplement our mainstream Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) development, we have created sophisticated full-scale wind-tunnel testing technologies and full-car test systems, to enable customers to validate full-scale aerodynamic test components prior to race application, thereby saving expensive, time-consuming and unrepeatable straight line track testing
I wonder if all the digital design domain is all a bit of a misnomer and they just couldn’t afford the Wind Tunnel work, I hope not. Without a comparison the Silverstone times are pretty useless but at least the car runs. We’ll have to wait until next week to see how it compares.
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