Foils on the leading edges of the wings

Peter wrote:

It means the entire effect must be 100% pure gold plated placebo.

I think a placebo would work on a driver just as well as on a cyclist, so would an actually better bicycle. Do you know, how much effort and money goes into development of running shoes, swimming suits etc.? Win is a win, be that because you were psyched up or had slightly better equipment. If the goal is winning, you don’t want to be unnecessarily at a disadvantage. Even if it’s a tiny one. You would kick yourself if you had lost by a split second.

It’s not really a case of an engineer coming to a driver and telling him that this machine is better and talking him into believing in it. They won’t really know until he drives it and they’ll typically test different configurations. I don’t see how trial and error could go well with placebo. It’s all very rational. And at the beginning of a season, they don’t know what the competition has. While they are still human and make mistakes, they are incredibly consistent in their performance. And the longer the race the more the mistakes average out, so to speak. In the end, machines make huge difference. Which is why there is typically so much regulation. And the little tweaks they make even over just one season make noticeable difference.

the problem is when you have a technical sport like car racing in compare with athletics etc the issue with the technical sport is that the equipment is a major part of the sucsess or non sucsess.
if you have 600-700 people working in a f1 team and about 150-200 of them just on aero and windtunnel, the details of the parts and solutions of design is difficult to discrebe and imagine for normal person. it used to be 365 days 24/7 3 shifts a day windtunnel time!!!!
with these resources and financial input (400millions a year per a top f1 team) they could design wounderful GA aircrafts lol

A 0.1% difference is way below the ability of the driver. It means the entire effect must be 100% pure gold plated placebo.

The other day I saw a prog about a study done with athletes (cyclists) who were given a new perf enhancing drug. Except it was placebo. It really improved their performance and they were quite specific about how they felt etc.

I guess the importance of such marginal performance tweaks in racing is due to the winning margins after 1.5 hours of racing being measured in seconds, which means speed differences are around 0.1%…

as for a racing car the front is extremly important for the airflow to the rest of the car i was refereing to the edge of the tape when taped to the leading edge of the wing(on a racing car) iknow it is only a few mu butit does make a difference on the aero of the race car ( but very small – only a few pointsin the windtunnel) can be completly neglegted on a airplane
on the formula cars the front wings are not painted on the underside (to save weight) and the edge of the paint is even flatend down to avoid any hickup on the airflow (just to give u an idea)

Peter_Paul wrote:

but we do see in the windtunnel some loss of performance so we have stoped using them (but that performance loss can be completly neglegted on airplanes)

Actually, when used to smooth over panel joins and such, vinyl tape is very effective in cleaning up aerodynamics.

we use them all the time on race cars as on the leading edge of the front wings is very close to the ground and therefore prone for stone chips.
but we do see in the windtunnel some loss of performance so we have stoped using them (but that performance loss can be completly neglegted on airplanes)
we also use the 3M stuff

Very nice, and a good idea. Thank you.