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**fount_pirat** · 03-10-2010, 03:17 AM

Regarding Virgin, I think they can do it reasonably well, and if they do so, CFD will become much stronger since other teams will also start to use and develop it. Maybe it´s the future or maybe it´s a fiasco (I don´t really have a clue), but I have the feeling of it being on the right path.

Make no mistake, everyone else on the grid is making extensive use of CFD, this isn't new.

Believing that you can be competitive with using only CFD is the only innovation from Virgin/Manor, however there is and will always be a difference between theory (including mathematical models used in CFD) and real life (the wind tunnel and ultimately the race track).

CFD isn't new, in fact it has been used for many years now, and quite a few years ago Sauber and recently Renault have acquired computer clusters with with huge computing power for their own use of CFD, as probably did Ferrari and McLaren but without making a big fuss about it, still they have at least one wind tunnel at disposal, some even several ones. And some of them event went as far as building wind tunnels big enough to accommodate 1:1 scale models and 2 cars running in front of each other, simply because mathematical models can not, at least yet, be used to model reality, and there is still not enough computing power available to make it real time either.

03-10-2010, 03:17 AM	#22
fount_pirat Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 618 Senior Member	Regarding Virgin, I think they can do it reasonably well, and if they do so, CFD will become much stronger since other teams will also start to use and develop it. Maybe it´s the future or maybe it´s a fiasco (I don´t really have a clue), but I have the feeling of it being on the right path. Make no mistake, everyone else on the grid is making extensive use of CFD, this isn't new. Believing that you can be competitive with using only CFD is the only innovation from Virgin/Manor, however there is and will always be a difference between theory (including mathematical models used in CFD) and real life (the wind tunnel and ultimately the race track). CFD isn't new, in fact it has been used for many years now, and quite a few years ago Sauber and recently Renault have acquired computer clusters with with huge computing power for their own use of CFD, as probably did Ferrari and McLaren but without making a big fuss about it, still they have at least one wind tunnel at disposal, some even several ones. And some of them event went as far as building wind tunnels big enough to accommodate 1:1 scale models and 2 cars running in front of each other, simply because mathematical models can not, at least yet, be used to model reality, and there is still not enough computing power available to make it real time either.
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