Turbogirl wrote:Since Aerospeed has already mentioned the Tyrrell P34 and its problem, that the tyre manufacturers were unwilling to produce special tyres for it, here are two versions, that might have worked better, because they used standard tyres instead of smaller ones like Tyrrell did. One is the Williams FW07D, the other one the March 2-4-1. But both were banned along with the six-wheeled Tyrrell, before they could be tested properly. But I remember having read an article, in which Patrick Head stated, the Williams six-wheeler was slightly better than its four-wheeled counterpart, but only slightly.
In the case of the FW07D test hack, I believe that the major problem was that the rearmost suspension arms compromised the design of the underbody of the car, compromising the aerodynamics of the car. The development version that would have become the FW08B was intended to rectify that issue, but in the end, as you say, the team decided that it wasn't worth pouring so many resources into a car that could only be used for the tail end of the 1982 season (the 1983 rules specified that only four wheels were allowed) when the conventional FW08 was already sufficiently competitive enough.
Thinking about some more modern controversies, the tricks with aero elasticity on some cars would definitely be another issue. We saw a very fierce debate over the flexibility of Red Bull's front wings a few years ago, but we also had the flexing "over the nose" wings on the McLaren and Williams cars in 2008 (where both teams had to add a little stay to fend off complaints of excessive deflection under load). There were also, IIRC, a few debates over the design of the front wing mount on McLaren's car a few years ago too which allowed it to rotate under load to reduce the wing angle, and therefore drag, at high speed, something I believe Whiting wasn't happy about.
IIRC, there were also a few complaints about excessive flexing of the rear wing of the RB4 at speed - it wasn't the first time that there were complaints about excessive deflection of a Newey designed rear wing, since there were a few rumours kicking about in 2004, IIRC, that suggested Kimi's rear wing failure in the German GP was because Newey had designed the rear wing to flex at speed to shed drag but hadn't quite perfected the design.
That's over 4 months!
