Formula One’s Movable Rear Wing Designed to Create Overtaking

One of the most controversial changes coming to Formula One racing in 2011 will be the movable rear wing.
Formula One’s Movable Rear Wing Designed to Create Overtaking
NEW WING COMING: F1 champion Sebastian Vettel drives the Red Bull RB6; its front and rear wings are clearly visible. (Stuart Franklin/Bongarts/Getty Images)
1/25/2011
Updated:
10/1/2015

<a><img src="https://www.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2015/09/VetteL107177605web.jpg" alt="NEW WING COMING: F1 champion Sebastian Vettel drives the Red Bull RB6; its front and rear wings are clearly visible. (Stuart Franklin/Bongarts/Getty Images)" title="NEW WING COMING: F1 champion Sebastian Vettel drives the Red Bull RB6; its front and rear wings are clearly visible. (Stuart Franklin/Bongarts/Getty Images)" width="320" class="size-medium wp-image-1809217"/></a>
NEW WING COMING: F1 champion Sebastian Vettel drives the Red Bull RB6; its front and rear wings are clearly visible. (Stuart Franklin/Bongarts/Getty Images)
One of the most controversial changes coming to Formula One racing in 2011 will be the movable rear wing.

Alternately praised and reviled by drivers, engineers, and team owners, the new movable rear wing was proposed as a way to increase overtaking, something that has been increasingly rare in these days of wide, high-downforce cars with carbon brakes and large aero wakes.

Modern F1 cars generate so much acceleration in every direction, that on many tracks, designed many years ago for narrower, slower cars, it is almost impossible for one driver to pass another. What’s more, the large wings, which press the cars to the pavement also create huge zones of turbulence, which unsettle cars coming up from behind.

Taken together, all this leads to races like parades; after the first few laps, everyone follows in order, and no one can overtake. To address this, Formula One introduced the new movable rear wing.

The new rear wing will be adjustable only under specific conditions—when one car is within one second of another car at certain parts of the track, mainly straightaways. The idea is that the pursuing car could flatten its wing, lowering drag and thus increasing top speed, to allow it to pass the car ahead.

Critics have said that the movable wing will cheapen the sport by creating fake overtaking opportunities. Supporters feel it can be used judiciously to improve racing.

Red Bull Principal Christian Horner and designer Adrian Newey, and Ferrari F1 Director Stefano Domenicali are among those that feel the wing will make racing artificial—instead of overtaking through skill, drivers would merely push a button.

“I wonder, will this system make the duels more spectacular or too predictable? At the moment I’m a bit skeptical, but I hope to be wrong,” Domenicali told ESPN.

“The difficulty of overtaking is overstated,” Newey told the Autosport Auto Show in England. “What difficult overtaking does mean is that when somebody does it, it is truly memorable. If it is so easy that you want to be second going into the last lap, then that becomes overly manufactured.”

Red Bull driver Mark Webber told ESPN, “We want to see more overtaking, but we also need to keep the element of skill involved in overtaking and not just hitting buttons, like KERS, like adjustable rear wings.”

Renault’s Robert Kubica told ESPN, “If the wings move a lot we will see the cars overtake in a straight line and I don’t think there is a lot of excitement to see that.”

The wing has some heavyweight supporters, including McLaren Team Principal Martin Whitmarsh and McLaren engineering director Paddy Lowe.

“I think it will be quite exciting,” Lowe told Formula1.com. “We are going to have to see and explore [its effects] throughout the season.”

Too Many Buttons

Along with the wing, F1 will see the reintroduction of Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems (KERS), which uses the energy of braking to provide brief bursts of extra accelerations.

Ferrari drivers Fernando Alonso and Felipe Massa said that with so many buttons to push—the rear wing, KERS—on top of driving at maximum speed, drivers might be a bit overwhelmed.

“Without realizing it, we’re losing the focus on driving,” SpeedTV.com reported Alonso as saying. “The cars become tougher to drive when you have to make all these changes from one turn to the next.”

“We have so many things to do on the steering wheel but we still need to drive the car,” Massa said. We can do it, but from a driver’s point of view it’s not fantastic. On every [turn] there are three or four buttons to press. It’s definitely a little too much.”

KERS Neutralizes Wing?

Even wing supporter Martin Whitmarsh admitted that the combination of the wing and KERS might counteract each other—the trailing driver would move the wing for a burst of speed, while the leading driver would use KERS to stay ahead.

“You are potentially going to have a stalled wing attack fought off with a KERS defense in some instances,” Whitmarsh told Autosport. “Or, you will have an attack that is a combination of KERS plus stalled rear wing.

“I don’t think you can predict it. We have just got to make sure we find a way to use it sensibly.”

Overtaking Obsession

McLaren’s Martin Whitmarsh questions whether overtaking is really important in any case.

“It is very fashionable to say that what we need in F1 is more overtaking,” he told Autosport. “I don’t think overtaking is an important as some people think it is. It has become a bit of an obsession. I think what people want is uncertainty of outcome.”

Overtaking itself might not be the mark of an exciting race. But the possibility of overtaking does create the tension which keeps fans watching a race. If viewers know that the leader cannot be passed, then racing becomes no more exciting than watching traffic on the freeway.

On the other hand, if overtaking is no more than pushing a button at the right time, overtaking loses some of its meaning. In a NASCAR restrictor-plate race, the lead changes every two laps but only the last lap counts. The other passes don’t count for much in the eyes of some fans.

The adjustable wing might improve the racing, but to many it seems like a gimmick, a way to ignore the more serious problems of how to race modern cars on older tracks, or how to build modern tracks where a driver can use skill and courage and car control.

Modern cars, with powerful brakes, two tons of downforce, and huge wakes, have fundamentally changed racing. Gimmicks might create interest for a season or two, but sooner or later F1 needs to reevaluate the sport from the ground up.