F-1 Steering

[Roland V. Johnson]

Shades of Harvey Templeton..............I know he did it with the camber though.

https://www.motorsportweek.com/2020/02/20/mercedes-fia-has-cleared-das-on-w11/

[Purple Frog]

My wild butt guess;

It must be somewhat like moving the rack fore and aft, thus taking toe out on the straights, adding it back in for braking and cornering.

I wonder how many hours on the simulator it took for drivers to get it smooth...

Thinking about it, if you screw up, you don't crash, you just go 1/100 slower.

[Bardahl77]

Like they don't have enough to remember with 800 controls on the wheel....

[SEComposites]

I bet it’s worth 1/10ths. Definitely worth having. I wonder also if it raises the front ride height just tick? So less tire scrub and less drag. Somewhere like Baku I bet it’s worth a lot of lap time. It looks like the mechanism is nicely damped to. I wonder if that’s adjustable as well? Very cool.

[cjsmith]

Wonder if they have something for the rear as well. With small servo motors and some out of the box thinking you might even be able to chance the toe per side for left or right turns as the driver made steering inputs. Wonder which would be harder, designing the system to work on the car or getting the sim program to depict what would happen with the changes.

[Bardahl77]

Wonder if they have something for the rear as well. With small servo motors and some out of the box thinking you might even be able to chance the toe per side for left or right turns as the driver made steering inputs. Wonder which would be harder, designing the system to work on the car or getting the sim program to depict what would happen with the changes.

i think the only reason they're allowing it this year (and they have already said it's banned for 2021) is because it's not powered in any way, just the driver pushing and pulling.

I wonder, if they had active suspension, traction control and ABS, movable wings, inertia dampers, fiddle brakes and the toe changers, how ridiculously fast would F1 be?

[Fred Michael]

Wonder if they have something for the rear as well. With small servo motors and some out of the box thinking you might even be able to chance the toe per side for left or right turns as the driver made steering inputs. Wonder which would be harder, designing the system to work on the car or getting the sim program to depict what would happen with the changes.

4 wheel steering is not allowed so nothing on the rear

[Daryl DeArman]

4 wheel steering is not allowed so nothing on the rear

That's not four wheel steering per-se. Wondering what they could/couldn't legally do with rear geometry to produce a desired toe change in roll but not in bump/droop. . .

[douglap1]

From the videos I saw, it looked like the system was being used to increase toe out to avoid corner entry understeer, and then returning to a neutral toe position after the corner to avoid tire wear & drag down the straight.

[scorp997]

Years back I was working on a suspension design that would have different camber rates in roll vs heave. Never went beyond the design drawing phase. The car would “know” if it were turning or just hitting a bump. I’m sure a variation of my design could change toe, if that is really what they are trying to achieve.

Is this F1 design related to the now outlawed suspension lower pickup mounted to the steering knuckle? That was a brilliant design that basically produced weight jacking in the corners and was totally passive.

My BMW e28 had a ‘virtual’ pivot point for steering, it used 2 lower arms each with an outer ball joint that changed the pivot center location as the wheel was turned.

toe correction under braking/cornering is nothing new, Porsche made a big deal about it with the 928s rear suspension. I doubt that F1 would use compliant bushings to achieve it, but flexible carbon a-arms would be doable.

[douglap1]

You may want to study this Daimler patent application (US 2015/0183286):

https://pdfaiw.uspto.gov/.aiw?Docid=...y=C3BD5C8C39E9

Years back I was working on a suspension design that would have different camber rates in roll vs heave. Never went beyond the design drawing phase. The car would “know” if it were turning or just hitting a bump. I’m sure a variation of my design could change toe, if that is really what they are trying to achieve.

Is this F1 design related to the now outlawed suspension lower pickup mounted to the steering knuckle? That was a brilliant design that basically produced weight jacking in the corners and was totally passive.

My BMW e28 had a ‘virtual’ pivot point for steering, it used 2 lower arms each with an outer ball joint that changed the pivot center location as the wheel was turned.

toe correction under braking/cornering is nothing new, Porsche made a big deal about it with the 928s rear suspension. I doubt that F1 would use compliant bushings to achieve it, but flexible carbon a-arms would be doable.

[Hardingfv32]

DAS really has nothing to do with a standard race car's use of toe changes.

It is a compensation method to cope with issues caused by the current front suspension designs. With current front F1 front suspensions, the spring system pushrods mount directly to the upright. Not to the control arms as we are use too seeing. Now assuming for a minute that the pushrods are not able to move (change position along their axis) and then you rotate/steer the front upright, the pushrod mounting point on the upright is going to move in an arc effectively changing the length of the fix pushrod and thus the ride height. All of this is done to control the ride height in turns for better aero. They want the front wing level even though the chassis is rolling. This has been around for many years and the FIA has even set limits on it.

The downside to this design is that steering in a straight line is a hand full. There is no steering center feel normally found in steering systems.

The legality issue derives from the fact that only a mechanic in the pits can change the 'suspension' settings. Is the steering part of the 'suspension' or does it stand alone in the rules?

Brian