Formula 1 has revealed the staggering amount of computer power that went into creating its new car for 2022.
After renderings and windtunnel models, fans and drivers finally got to see a full-size version of the cars that teams are currently developing to hit the track next year.
At the heart of the new regulations is a push for closer racing by reducing the impact of turbulent air, as well as developing a more sustainable and safer F1 for the future.
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But on that main point, FIA head of single-seaters Nikolas Tombazis is wary to predict Formula E levels of action in F1 straight away.
“We expect to see closer racing,” he stated.
“Maybe not from the first race because maybe somebody will get the new rules right and somebody’s wrong, but very soon we expect to see a closer level of competitiveness between the cars and cars being able to follow each other more closely.
“It won’t happen overnight,” he conceded. “We will obviously study what solutions the teams produce, and we will keep working at it, to improve.
“But we believe over time the racing will improve sizeably.”
The new cars were originally meant to be introduced this year before that was delayed a year by Covid-19.
However, that has given F1 and the FIA more time to ensure the new cars do exactly as intended.
“We started the journey in 2017 so we spent longer on this car than I think any other car that has been produced in Formula 1, in terms of getting some regulations together,” F1 technical director Pat Symonds said.
“The aerodynamics generally in a team is developed in three ways – it’s developed using computational fluid dynamics, it’s done using an actual windtunnel, and it’s done using the car itself.
“We didn’t have access to the latter so we’ve really concentrated on our computational fluid dynamics and backed it up with some windtunnel testing.
“But our CFD has been much more sophisticated than is used in the teams, and we’ve been able to do that thanks to our partners at Amazon AWS, who’ve allowed us to run these very sophisticated simulations – around a 70% saving in time to what we were doing initially.”
It was then the former Renault and Williams tech chief offered an insight into just how much technology went into 2022 development.
“To give you an idea of how big these things are, our CFD project uses over 1150 computer cores and we have 550 million data points on each model that we run,” he explained.
“We’ve run 7500 simulations since we started so that’s around 16 and a half million core hours of computing.
“Now to put that into context, if you did that on a pretty sophisticated four-core laptop it’ll take you 471 years to do what we’ve done in developing this car.
“We’ve also produced a huge amount of data, around a petabyte of data. And to put that in a context that’s equivalent to 10 million four-drawer filing cabinets full of paper all written on or around a third of the 10 billion images that are on Facebook at the moment.”
Let’s hope it works then!