Tag Archives: wirth research

Mar201026

Rob

0

Virgin fail to make their fuel tank large enough to last the race distance

Virgin seem to have managed to build themselves a car that doesn’t actually have a big enough fuel tank to last the race distance. That finishes off their chance of completing the next few races then, with them unable to get a new design together and built before the Spanish GP that means that something has to give at the next three races – will they run at half pace for some laps or will they just see how far they get?
It seems strange that they have managed to design themselves into this position, the refueling rules were the big change this year and all the other teams have managed it. It seems that they will have to cut the back off of their chassis and bond a new longer section to the back so that they can add the capacity to the fuel tank. Their application to the FIA [...]

Feb201004

Rob

0

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 [...]

Feb201003

Rob

0

Virgin launch the CFD car

Today Virgin launched their car online on their website, the CFD only – no windtunnel – designed car will hit the track later in the week and they will become the first new team to put some real miles on the car.
The car designed by Wirth Research was set to be unveiled on the teams website but it seems that release had been delayed for a while and that we all had to wait, not the best start for a team that has relyed on it computational expertise to design the car. Hopefully the systems are engineered by different people.
The car itself looks somewhat smoother than the other cars, and it’s striking red and black colours with more flat surfaces, we’ll have to see what it runs like tomorrow.
With the driving partnership of Timo Glock and Lucas di Grassi they’ll be hoping for some problem free days of running to [...]