2015 Formula 1 United States Grand Prix

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Looks like a few more hours of rain and everything will be good for the rest of the day.
 
ShiftingGears
Pales in comparison to Liuzzi being potentially being killed going under a tractor...



I think it is. If the tractor wasn't there, there wouldn'tve been a horrific crash and we wouldn't be having this discussion.
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You mean liuzzi hitting the safety car. It was kind of a comical situation. The SC had to suddenly go flat out to avoid being hit by an out of coutnrol Liuzzi spinning his car. The SC managed to avoid him and he ended up just "kissing" the tractor with the rear.
 
Holdenhsvgtsr
Still pointless comparing cars in the wet on wets to cars in the wet on slicks
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Fine the 12H of Mud formally known as Petite Le Mans had the same issue and it was on rain tires. The point you're trying to make that one is more inferior to the other is moot, since I don't know of a single series outside the international hovercraft sport racer championship (:sly:) that races in that much standing water. In other words, even the great WEC and other series like it can't do it.
 
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According to the weather forecast, it seems like we may still have a bit of rain during qualifying and cloudy during the race. It'll be interesting to see how they all deal with the dry circuit (if the rain stays away) since they never had a dry-running yet since Friday.
 
Prince.M5
According to the weather forecast, it seems like we may still have a bit of rain during qualifying and cloudy during the race. It'll be interesting to see how they all deal with the dry circuit (if the rain stays away) since they never had a dry-running yet since Friday.
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The faster teams will pray that their simulation data is good. The slower teams will hope to be able to pounce on misfortune.

Maldonado will drive into a wall.
 
Will Buxton says COTA has jet dryers out working on getting the water off the track as much as they can. Still raining but not as much as it was yesterday.

I'm a bit mixed on whether I want to see qualifying happen or not. On one hand, it would get a proper grid set, but on the other, the FP3 results were interesting and would mix things up a bit, aside from Hamilton starting P1 either way.
 
GTPorsche
Will Buxton says COTA has jet dryers out working on getting the water off the track as much as they can.
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I'm suprised that the Brian France/ISC/SMI regime allowed him access to those things.
 
GTPorsche
Jet Dryers are not a NASCAR specific thing.
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Well I have only heard of them being used in NASCAR and Indycar but I stand corrected.
 
TenEightyOne
They're used at many tracks, they were used in Sochi too. Wasn't it one of those that dropped the diesel oil before the practice session?
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Yes.

Edit: @ukfan758 Dryers outside of oval racing are typically only used to clear standing water, not to completely dry things. (Yes, I know the edit won't give an alert but I wanted to make sure this wasn't directed at anyone else)
 
They have them in drag racing too. Here's Santa Pod's:

surfacedrying1.jpg
 
GTPorsche
Yes.

Edit: @ukfan758 Dryers outside of oval racing are typically only used to clear standing water, not to completely dry things. (Yes, I know the edit won't give an alert but I wanted to make sure this wasn't directed at anyone else)
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Ah, thanks for the additional info. 👍
 
Famine
They have them in drag racing too. Here's Santa Pod's:

surfacedrying1.jpg
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Huh. Santa Pod is much closer to Stratford than I realised :sly:

On another note, given that F1 cars frequently aquaplane due to running such low ride heights (with the entire car floating up on its own floor), why not design the plank in such a way that it could be removable for wet races? Of course the risk of the tyres becoming overwhelmed would remain, but it would surely help the cars become more drivable severe conditions.
 
ukfan758
Sadly, most of those live streams are usually only active during news broadcasts. But it could be 24/7.
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Yeah I only posted the link since they were doing live reports from the track and a local weather report.
 
GTP_Ingram
Huh. Santa Pod is much closer to Stratford than I realised :sly:

On another note, given that F1 cars frequently aquaplane due to running such low ride heights (with the entire car floating up on its own floor), why not design the plank in such a way that it could be removable for wet races? Of course the risk of the tyres becoming overwhelmed would remain, but it would surely help the cars become more drivable severe conditions.
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That would be too logical.
 
I hope that they don't jet dry the track too much, sure move the puddles out of the way but don't dry the whole track, we don't just want to watch a race, we want to watch a great race.
 
If they were to dry the entire track, it would take them until race time to do so. Besides, Pirelli wet weather race tires are more efficient at drying the track than jet dryers typically are. When you've got 20 F1 cars displacing around 260 liters per second, or whatever the figure is for the 4 tires combined, it doesn't take too long for the track to dry. I think I heard it was in the area of 65 liters per second, per tire. I could be wrong though...
 
GTP_Ingram
Huh. Santa Pod is much closer to Stratford than I realised :sly:

On another note, given that F1 cars frequently aquaplane due to running such low ride heights (with the entire car floating up on its own floor), why not design the plank in such a way that it could be removable for wet races? Of course the risk of the tyres becoming overwhelmed would remain, but it would surely help the cars become more drivable severe conditions.
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Because the tyre blocks aquaplane before the undertray. Without the plank there'd be no way to enforce ride heights and teams would find ways to run the cars lower. You'd simply add the problem of undertray aquaplaning in situations where it didn't already exist.
 
GTPorsche
If they were to dry the entire track, it would take them until race time to do so. Besides, Pirelli wet weather race tires are more efficient at drying the track than jet dryers typically are. When you've got 20 F1 cars displacing around 260 liters per second, or whatever the figure is for the 4 tires combined, it doesn't take too long for the track to dry. I think I heard it was in the area of 65 liters per second, per tire. I could be wrong though...
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Three things there.

Firstly, that figure is at 186mph. It's not super hard to believe - that's a little more than 80m/s on tyres that are 660mm wide (for the rears - the fronts will clear far less), so they're clearing a strip of 55 square metres every second. That means they're carving a channel of about 1mm of water. Suddenly 60 litres/second doesn't seem that much, does it?

Secondly, that figure is at 186mph. Where F1 cars struggle is low speed corners, where the tyre pressures drop, the ride height drops, the brakes cool, the tyres cool and there's not enough air flowing over the wings to create significant downforce. The tyres will clear just about 15 litres a second off the surface there, and a jet dryer can absolutely exceed that.

But most importantly of all, they only displace water. Where do they displace it to? The bit of track either side of the tyre. With dryers you can force the water off the track altogether, but if you rely on the cars you get two nice, dry grooves on the racing line only. Eventually, with enough time, you'll get about 110% of a car's width of dry line, on the racing line.
 
Thumbs-up from Charlie Whiting after his track tour in the Safety Car... looks like they might be running some F1 today :D
 
That guy from the link @IforceV8 posted with the local Austin news, just called Leigh Diffey, Leigh Stiffey...
 
TenEightyOne
Because the tyre blocks aquaplane before the undertray.
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Is that correct though? If they always aquaplaned via the tyres first, surely they would almost never aquaplane via the floor (which they can and do)?

Without the plank there'd be no way to enforce ride heights and teams would find ways to run the cars lower. You'd simply add the problem of undertray aquaplaning in situations where it didn't already exist.
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While I agree that F1 engineers always try to find a way to dodge rules, I'm sure that some sort of effective regulation could be devised to ensure a sensible ride height in wet weather. My guess is that teams wouldn't want to run much lower in wet conditions, or else they'd start aquaplaning anyway...
 
GTP_Ingram
Is that correct though? If they always aquaplaned via the tyres first, surely they would almost never aquaplane via the floor (which they can and do)?
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They can do both. Cars can indeed aquaplane via the floor first but that can only be due to a bad setup where the tyres aren't given the room they need to work. Ideally tyres should go before the floor.

GTP_Ingram
While I agree that F1 engineers always try to find a way to dodge rules, I'm sure that some sort of effective regulation could be devised to ensure a sensible ride height in wet weather. My guess is that teams wouldn't want to run much lower in wet conditions, or else they'd start aquaplaning anyway...
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It exists, it's the plank. Other measurements are difficult to take - a good example is the flexi-panels that were employed by several teams that still passed the static load tests.
 
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