Vehicle Dynamics · Demo
Wings and floors press the tyres down for free — until the drag bill and the balance bar arrive.
The setup sheet
Chase the highest cornering g you can hold at your corner speed — then check what it did to the drag wall and the balance bar.
Readout
Grip is computed by the same tyre model as the Tyre Grip demo — including the load sensitivity that makes downforce pay diminishing returns.
In plain terms
A tyre grips in proportion to how hard it is pressed into the road. Press it with weight and you gain nothing — the extra mass needs exactly the extra grip it brought. Press it with air and the arithmetic changes completely: wings and floors add load without adding a gram, so the cornering limit climbs with the square of speed. The catch is that downforce is bought with drag — the faster you want to corner, the slower you go in a straight line — and that where the downforce lands matters as much as how much there is: too little on the nose and the car understeers, too little on the tail and it bites.
Each device makes downforce in proportion to dynamic pressure,
( at full level: front wing 1.15 m², rear wing 1.5 m², floor 2.5 m²) and pays for it in drag at its own lift-to-drag ratio — wings ≈ 3, the floor ≈ 8 — on top of a 0.75 m² body. Axle loads are static weight (46% front) plus each device’s share of downforce, and each axle’s cornering capability comes from the same load-sensitive slick model as the Tyre Grip demo. In a steady corner each axle must supply lateral force in proportion to the massit carries, so the car’s limit is set by whichever axle runs out first:
— and that axle is the under/oversteer verdict. Top speed solves at 700 kW.
The chassis is a point mass: no lateral weight transfer, no suspension geometry, no tyre-temperature coupling, a fixed centre of pressure per device, sea-level air. The numbers land in the published F1 envelope — own-weight downforce around 180 km/h, 4–6 g fast corners, 330+ km/h in low-drag trim.