Ferrari F80 Hypercar Aerodynamics Overview

Ferrari just launched their F80 hypercar and in this video we're going to go through and have a look at the aerodynamics of this car. When I first started seeing images of this car come through aerodynamically I thought it wasn't really that interesting but as more images came out and I got to see more of the underfloor and the cooling system I saw there were far more things that were actually quite intriguing to have a look at and that's what we're going to be covering in this video. For those of you that are new to my channel, I was an aerodynamicist for Mercedes for the 2018, 19 and 20 Formula 1 seasons. I now work as an aerodynamics consultant, designing race car aerodynamics kits in different classes all around the world. Now this video comes with my standard disclaimer of no aerodynamicist can perfectly predict flows just by eye, so everything that I discuss in this video is at best a very educated guess. With that out of the way, let's get into the analysis. Now I actually want to start off on this car with the cooling system because I think there's a few interesting points to note here. If you have a look at this image over here, you'll see that there's a lot of different coolers on the car. So you see we've got this red series of coolers at the front, we've got some big yellow ones at the back, and then we've got two blue ones all the way at the rear. Now it's a little bit tricky to decipher what's what with any of these systems because obviously we can't get great views of the plumbing from what we've got here. But you'll note that these coolers all seem to link via a common tube through there. And the tube coming to these rear yellow coolers is quite large. So to me, it looks like these yellow coolers are the intercoolers for the engine because it's a turbocharged engine. And then I think our main water cooling circuit is up the front. If you look at the top down view, this supports my suspicion where if you have a look, we have these pipes that are going into the top. of the side coolers at the rear and if you look at the actual diagram of the engine that looks like to me that it's the exit pipe of the turbo compressor and then if you have a look you've got fairly large diameter cooling pipes running down through the center to go out to this radiator and then back from this radiator here So like I said, I think that this is the main water circuit at the front and then obviously somewhere along this line These various coolers are going to be doing things like the front's going to have to do some form of cooling for the battery, the front electric motor and stuff like that. And then we've also got these rear coolers, which could be doing a whole bunch of different things. There's a lot of smaller tube plumbing coming from them. So these could be doing things like your transmission cooling. They maybe are doing motor cooling or battery cooling. The key thing I wanted to note is just that we've got quite a few different locations for these coolers that we're now going to discuss the ducting for. Now the ducting around the front coolers gets quite interesting quite quickly. If you remember from the previous image we had that central cooler and then we've got the side coolers which are sort of laid back over the sides there and of course on the other side as well. Now you'll note just behind that central cooler you'll see this exit here indicated in green. Now that's obviously where the air is exiting the central cooler. Some of this air that's coming in through the front here is going to turn up and then exit out through there. and go along. You'll notice there's another hole back here that I've indicated in purple. That's actually for aerodynamic performance and we'll go into that a little bit later. With the side coolers though it's quite a tricky one because they're trying to package quite a large cooler into a space that doesn't have a huge amount of exit area. So you'll note that the cooler is sort of laid back it's got a bit of a slant to it and I hazard a guess that some of that is because they've got this air coming in the front into the cooler and they're trying to get it out through this vent here. So basically there's this this vent alongside the car there. I think some of the air is coming in there and going out there. Venting this air out the side is superior to venting it into the wheel wells, but given the size of the cooler, I wouldn't at all be surprised if they are doing what's a pretty standard OEM move, which is to vent cooling air off the backside of the radiator into the wheel wells. It's not great from an aerodynamic performance standpoint, but they are kind of limited with where else they're putting all their cooling. If you go further rearwards one thing you'll notice is there's this sort of Nacaduct style duct. It's not really quite a Nacaduct but it's sort of Nacaduct-ish up high that's not that big given the size of the pretty large coolers back here. But there's this hollow here that you can't see from outside the car. So I think that what we've got here is we've got a pass-through that's going through the door and picking air up from further upstream. We also have further down an inlet down here. that could also be feeding air up to this intercooler. Those two rear coolers are then fed with air that's coming over the top of the bodywork, so air that's coming over there, and they'll go and vent through the cooler and out the back. There's a big gaping hole at the back of the car. That's where this air will be coming out. The other cooling you'll want to note are these two little ones here, there and there. Now, if you have a look at where the... These are going. It looks almost like they're going straight into the chassis rail. And I saw on one of the press releases somewhere, I couldn't find it later, but basically they were saying that the hollow chassis rails allow them to draw their brake duct air from the chassis rail. And if we have a look at this top down view of the brakes here, and just zoom in here, you'll see that this is obviously our brake duct that's coming through just underneath the suspension. You can just make it out. And that does look like it bolts roughly to where... the chassis rail will be. So I think that those front scoops are actually your brake cooling scoops. It's worth noting that further rearwards we have a brake cooling duct that's going up and then obviously air is coming over the top and then getting blown down and into the brake that way. However there's no scoops or anything external to the bodywork so this must be managed through some of those internal flows that we were talking about before. Let's move on now to aerodynamically what I think is the most interesting part on the car which is the front end. Now if you just look at one of these photos from the front the car aerodynamically looks quite vanilla. If I hadn't have seen any shots from underneath the car I would just be like oh yeah you've got what probably what standard cooling radiator in the center line that's venting out here. You might have some side coolers there that you can see through the front grills but apart from that it's pretty standard. And when you look at a picture just like this you start to question the downforce numbers quoted which is 1050 kilos at 155 miles per hour which is an SCZ of around about 3.5. However once you start to see those extra details you realize that that is very much within the achievable margins. When we look at what's actually happening in the center section of the splitter what we have is essentially a triple element wing. So we have a first element that is here then we have a second element there and a third element further up. You can see quite clearly in this particular shot that they've got where they've pulled off the front section where obviously the cooler sits just forward of there And you can see this triple element wing set up here just behind that you then have a tea tray or keel style setup Just back here while at the sides you have something that's more of a conventional splitter set up a very Mild the front diffuser into the front wheels a very mild diffuser just in board of that as well So you've got a bit of a split going on and you've got a forward lip that is sticking out a little bit just like a little mini splitter but it's worth noting that some of the details around there are going to be styling driven and not just pure aero performance driven. Now I know from experience with setups on similar cars that I've developed this type of triple element front wing into a venting up setup produces bucket loads of front downforce along the center line of the splitter and it also gives you the luxury of being able to to have that real nice airfoil profile all through that center line that's just going to give you very good aero performance in general at the front end. So I think it's quite cool that they've implemented it in the way that they have and it's a fairly clean implementation. There's a few things that you have to consider with a design like this. The first thing is that you're generating so much upwash at the rear of the splitter that you are generating upwash on what becomes the leading edge of your tea tray here. So this tea tray here is going to actually have air trying to go up on it so i wouldn't be surprised if this region around here is actually making a bit of lift from that upwash the other thing is that obviously we are fundamentally in a touring car not an open wheeler and so whatever flows we extract up we still have to deal with the fact that we have high energy air further downstream on top of the tea tray and so we have to either get that out or work out how to safely and successfully ingest it back under the floor and we'll talk about that when we go to the mid-floor of the car Further outboard, like I said earlier, we've got very modest diffusers. And I do wonder for a start if some of the modesty of that diffuser is a result of the cooler location above it, or what they're doing with venting the cooling. But another theory I had is that the front control arm, the lower, is quite low. And it also doesn't have much in the way of aero work done on it. If you look at it, it's not an aerodynamic piece at all. So if you go and crank a large... front diffuser in this region here what happens is that you'll get lots of airflow going over this control arm and that to me would not be advantageous with such an unoptimized aerodynamically control arm so instead if you run a more conservative front diffuser outboard and just extract as much load as possible along the center line then that means that you don't have to worry about the fact that your suspension is aerodynamically not optimal i think that in general some of the suspension and mechanical packaging instances on this car sort of hark back to the fact this is fundamentally a road car. It's not like something like say a Valkyrie or anything like that where it's a race car that has then been converted to be a road car. This is a road car that has then had some interesting aero added to it. And that kind of shows up too in some of the detail work as well, that all over the floor you'll see that we've got a bunch of sort of split lines in high suction zones. We've got many of these little recessed fixings all over the car, where if we were doing a more race car style approach, this is all critical. surface area that we wouldn't want steps or holes in so you would have these nice and smooth you would find other ways to attach the panels and again going back to that Valkyrie comparison on a Valkyrie you'll find that all these panels on the the suction side are much much much smoother than what these renders have shown us. Another detail that really bears talking about here is their implementation of active aerodynamics on the front because I think it's quite an elegant way of having a small aerodynamic device that can have large ramifications. It's essentially this gurney here, which is a small deployable spoiler, if you will, on the underside of the splitter. And when that's deployed, that's obviously going to completely ruin the flow on the back portion of this. And it's going to disrupt any chance for that flow to get turned up. Obviously, there's some flow that's going through the slot gaps of the wings where we have the different elements. And that flow will still find its way up. But the bulk flow from underneath. won't go up as much and it's more likely to just go straight under the floor. If it deploys enough, it's hard to get a read on it from front view, but it will also deploy a lot of loss downstream, which will again block up any clean flows to the centerline T-tray, which should decrease front downforce and total downforce across the whole car. So basically it's implementing a very small aerodynamic device to yield quite a large aerodynamic state change. So this is going to... decrease the front balance on the car, decrease the total downforce, and maybe it would reduce the drag as a result of less expansion up the top and also just less high-end gear getting to the strakes here. So anyway, I think that's quite a neat way of doing it in a pretty simple manner. So going further rearwards, let's talk about the implications of the T-tray further downstream. So you'll see that obviously the front of the T-tray is clean. There's no strakes or anything like that on that. But as you go further rearwards, we have these outwashing strikes. It's not unlike what you would see on a Formula One car, but that's just an example where you can see it readily. These are on plenty of race cars. And actually on their little flow graphic, this looks like it might be based off CFD, or if not, it would be based off something pretty close to CFD, where you can see basically this vortex system getting spooled up here. So each one of these. Strakes will make a vortex, those vortices will combine together and you'll get vorticity along the car, that will generate a bunch of suction on the underfloor and you get downforce. You also note behind the tires, you'll see these two strakes here. Now I think one of the things that's interesting for me here is that these strakes almost look in washing to me. Typically when you see treatments like this, like I know the newer 911s have a treatment there, it's usually a more out washing treatment where they're just trying to get the rear wheel wake out as hard as possible. These look more in washing so maybe they're just trying to control the trajectory of some of the structures along the back here. Not 100% sure how they'd be using that but it's just something that's worth noting. It's worth noting too that there's not a whole lot of venting from the arch like the wheel guard above there. There's going to be a little bit of room to flow out air from the wheel well but nothing too crazy. So a lot of it's going to re-enter the floor. And so obviously you see this floor leading edge that's quite soft. and rolled in that's going to accept any of the flows from either the higher up T-tray or just the bits that are coming along through the wheel arch and then allow that to be picked up by the floor without too much in the way of separations going on at the front. Obviously this whole geometry is going to generate a fair amount of pressure out here. That is a positive thing because A you're going to get more secondary flows through your wheel well so that that will help shade with a brake cooling or anything like that. But also it's just good to pressurize this area to try and kick that wheel wake outboard. Going further rearwards, you'll again see all these little fastener divots all over the place and lots of split lines. Like I mentioned, I think this is largely a road car detail creeping in. Although I do wonder with a battery in the midships of the car if they need to have some burst discs or something like that for a safety perspective. And that could explain some of these divots because there does seem to be an awful lot of them. If we keep going back. We eventually get to the diffuser, which seems to have a kick line that starts here. It's quite a mellow angle. You can see that the diffuser more or less takes shape like that, and then it's got a strake in it further rearwards. It is somewhat interesting to me that in a Top Gear video on it, it was mentioned that Ferrari packaged a tight chassis so they could start the diffuser kick. kick much earlier but the diffuser kick is at least to my mind fairly late compared to some of its competitors so I'm not quite sure what's going on there but I am aware that like say the McLaren W1 things like that they've got the engine tilted forwards a little bit currently to just help with getting a bit more diffuser volume a little bit earlier so that's a trend that's pretty common now across the supercars and hypercars is just getting that bigger diffuser you Obviously one of the things that is going to be limiting that diffuser's expansion is the engine Because even though it's a V6, so it's quite a short engine. It's also quite a wide V. It's a 120 degree V So it's very flat Engine and that means that you can't just go and run up tunnels super high up the side of it It's also worth noting though that it's a hot V engine so exhaust in the center Intake at the outside and that obviously has effects on how you package your diffuser because it changes whether or not your hot manifold, which can be quite bulky in some circumstances, is down the bottom or up high. Even with that though, they have managed to get a reasonable amount of diffuser volume at the exit with a fairly conservative expansion, so I mean, it's going to be a reasonable diffuser, it's just obviously not quite as awe-inspiring as when you go and have a look at like an RB17 or a Valkyrie or that type of setup. Looking rearwards and higher up, we can talk a little bit about the rear wing. Now it's only a single element rear wing, no multi-element stuff going on here, but it is active. So it can go up and down, it will rest against the more or less the bodywork when it's in the low position. You can see it's got these actuators here. So we'll go up and down and we'll also tilt forwards and backwards. So you've got active angle of attack and active deployment. Obviously whenever you're on a track you're going to be deployed but then it's going to change the angle of attack. Obviously the two actuators here allow it to push either the whole assembly up and down or to rotate it forwards and backwards. Now most of this wing's shaping is going to be based on aesthetics in terms of how it curves around the car. It's obviously matching up to the boot line and things like that. It's not strictly speaking the most aerodynamic requirement to have a wing of this shape, but generally it does seem like it's just got a small gurney on the back of it and the profile is probably quite well shaped because it makes a reasonable amount of downforce. You'll note in the center too that they've implemented a little ramp up to fit a lighting unit at the back of the car and I think that's actually a pretty good implementation with respect to running the gurney across the whole wing and then just filling out some of the gurney space rather than say thickening your trailing edge and not having a gurney which would be in my mind a worse implementation than this. Now you'll notice that I haven't commented too much on the body of the car in general and that comes back to the fact that as with a lot of these top-tier hypercars is that most of what you see around this region here is for looks so all the detailing you see around like this sort of ducting how they've done like their lines and their cuts and stuff like that a huge amount of that is down to aesthetics and not necessarily raw functionality engineers have gone through afterwards and obviously shoehorned the functionality inks the car has to perform it has to keep cool and various other things but a lot of this design work is aesthetic design. Another final thing to note that's aerodynamics adjacent is that this car has an active suspension system developed by Multimatic. It allows control of the ride height. Nothing conceptually new about it, but obviously it's just worth mentioning that this thing has good platform control. Although when you look at the aerodynamics of the car, it doesn't look like a car that's super platform sensitive in the first place, but aerodynamically it's always going to be a benefit to... have better control over the ride of the car. Well that's all for this video. Thanks for watching. If you liked it don't forget to hit that like button and subscribe to my channel for more content like this. Leave a comment below on what videos you'd like to see next from me and hopefully I'll see you next time.

I now work as an aerodynamics consultant, designing race car aerodynamics kits in different classes all around the world. Now this video comes with my standard disclaimer of no aerodynamicist can perfectly predict flows just by eye, so everything that I discuss in this video is at best a very educated guess. With that out of the way, let's get into the analysis. Now I actually want to start off on this car with the cooling system because I think there's a few interesting points to note here.

If you have a look at this image over here, you'll see that there's a lot of different coolers on the car. So you see we've got this red series of coolers at the front, we've got some big yellow ones at the back, and then we've got two blue ones all the way at the rear. Now it's a little bit tricky to decipher what's what with any of these systems because obviously we can't get great views of the plumbing from what we've got here.

But you'll note that these coolers all seem to link via a common tube through there. And the tube coming to these rear yellow coolers is quite large. So to me, it looks like these yellow coolers are the intercoolers for the engine because it's a turbocharged engine.

And then I think our main water cooling circuit is up the front. If you look at the top down view, this supports my suspicion where if you have a look, we have these pipes that are going into the top. of the side coolers at the rear and if you look at the actual diagram of the engine that looks like to me that it's the exit pipe of the turbo compressor and then if you have a look you've got fairly large diameter cooling pipes running down through the center to go out to this radiator and then back from this radiator here So like I said, I think that this is the main water circuit at the front and then obviously somewhere along this line These various coolers are going to be doing things like the front's going to have to do some form of cooling for the battery, the front electric motor and stuff like that.

And then we've also got these rear coolers, which could be doing a whole bunch of different things. There's a lot of smaller tube plumbing coming from them. So these could be doing things like your transmission cooling.

They maybe are doing motor cooling or battery cooling. The key thing I wanted to note is just that we've got quite a few different locations for these coolers that we're now going to discuss the ducting for. Now the ducting around the front coolers gets quite interesting quite quickly.

If you remember from the previous image we had that central cooler and then we've got the side coolers which are sort of laid back over the sides there and of course on the other side as well. Now you'll note just behind that central cooler you'll see this exit here indicated in green. Now that's obviously where the air is exiting the central cooler.

Some of this air that's coming in through the front here is going to turn up and then exit out through there. and go along. You'll notice there's another hole back here that I've indicated in purple.

That's actually for aerodynamic performance and we'll go into that a little bit later. With the side coolers though it's quite a tricky one because they're trying to package quite a large cooler into a space that doesn't have a huge amount of exit area. So you'll note that the cooler is sort of laid back it's got a bit of a slant to it and I hazard a guess that some of that is because they've got this air coming in the front into the cooler and they're trying to get it out through this vent here. So basically there's this this vent alongside the car there. I think some of the air is coming in there and going out there.

Venting this air out the side is superior to venting it into the wheel wells, but given the size of the cooler, I wouldn't at all be surprised if they are doing what's a pretty standard OEM move, which is to vent cooling air off the backside of the radiator into the wheel wells. It's not great from an aerodynamic performance standpoint, but they are kind of limited with where else they're putting all their cooling. If you go further rearwards one thing you'll notice is there's this sort of Nacaduct style duct.

It's not really quite a Nacaduct but it's sort of Nacaduct-ish up high that's not that big given the size of the pretty large coolers back here. But there's this hollow here that you can't see from outside the car. So I think that what we've got here is we've got a pass-through that's going through the door and picking air up from further upstream.

We also have further down an inlet down here. that could also be feeding air up to this intercooler. Those two rear coolers are then fed with air that's coming over the top of the bodywork, so air that's coming over there, and they'll go and vent through the cooler and out the back.

There's a big gaping hole at the back of the car. That's where this air will be coming out. The other cooling you'll want to note are these two little ones here, there and there. Now, if you have a look at where the... These are going.

It looks almost like they're going straight into the chassis rail. And I saw on one of the press releases somewhere, I couldn't find it later, but basically they were saying that the hollow chassis rails allow them to draw their brake duct air from the chassis rail. And if we have a look at this top down view of the brakes here, and just zoom in here, you'll see that this is obviously our brake duct that's coming through just underneath the suspension.

You can just make it out. And that does look like it bolts roughly to where... the chassis rail will be. So I think that those front scoops are actually your brake cooling scoops. It's worth noting that further rearwards we have a brake cooling duct that's going up and then obviously air is coming over the top and then getting blown down and into the brake that way.

However there's no scoops or anything external to the bodywork so this must be managed through some of those internal flows that we were talking about before. Let's move on now to aerodynamically what I think is the most interesting part on the car which is the front end. Now if you just look at one of these photos from the front the car aerodynamically looks quite vanilla.

If I hadn't have seen any shots from underneath the car I would just be like oh yeah you've got what probably what standard cooling radiator in the center line that's venting out here. You might have some side coolers there that you can see through the front grills but apart from that it's pretty standard. And when you look at a picture just like this you start to question the downforce numbers quoted which is 1050 kilos at 155 miles per hour which is an SCZ of around about 3.5. However once you start to see those extra details you realize that that is very much within the achievable margins.

When we look at what's actually happening in the center section of the splitter what we have is essentially a triple element wing. So we have a first element that is here then we have a second element there and a third element further up. You can see quite clearly in this particular shot that they've got where they've pulled off the front section where obviously the cooler sits just forward of there And you can see this triple element wing set up here just behind that you then have a tea tray or keel style setup Just back here while at the sides you have something that's more of a conventional splitter set up a very Mild the front diffuser into the front wheels a very mild diffuser just in board of that as well So you've got a bit of a split going on and you've got a forward lip that is sticking out a little bit just like a little mini splitter but it's worth noting that some of the details around there are going to be styling driven and not just pure aero performance driven.

Now I know from experience with setups on similar cars that I've developed this type of triple element front wing into a venting up setup produces bucket loads of front downforce along the center line of the splitter and it also gives you the luxury of being able to to have that real nice airfoil profile all through that center line that's just going to give you very good aero performance in general at the front end. So I think it's quite cool that they've implemented it in the way that they have and it's a fairly clean implementation. There's a few things that you have to consider with a design like this.

The first thing is that you're generating so much upwash at the rear of the splitter that you are generating upwash on what becomes the leading edge of your tea tray here. So this tea tray here is going to actually have air trying to go up on it so i wouldn't be surprised if this region around here is actually making a bit of lift from that upwash the other thing is that obviously we are fundamentally in a touring car not an open wheeler and so whatever flows we extract up we still have to deal with the fact that we have high energy air further downstream on top of the tea tray and so we have to either get that out or work out how to safely and successfully ingest it back under the floor and we'll talk about that when we go to the mid-floor of the car Further outboard, like I said earlier, we've got very modest diffusers. And I do wonder for a start if some of the modesty of that diffuser is a result of the cooler location above it, or what they're doing with venting the cooling.

But another theory I had is that the front control arm, the lower, is quite low. And it also doesn't have much in the way of aero work done on it. If you look at it, it's not an aerodynamic piece at all.

So if you go and crank a large... front diffuser in this region here what happens is that you'll get lots of airflow going over this control arm and that to me would not be advantageous with such an unoptimized aerodynamically control arm so instead if you run a more conservative front diffuser outboard and just extract as much load as possible along the center line then that means that you don't have to worry about the fact that your suspension is aerodynamically not optimal i think that in general some of the suspension and mechanical packaging instances on this car sort of hark back to the fact this is fundamentally a road car. It's not like something like say a Valkyrie or anything like that where it's a race car that has then been converted to be a road car. This is a road car that has then had some interesting aero added to it.

And that kind of shows up too in some of the detail work as well, that all over the floor you'll see that we've got a bunch of sort of split lines in high suction zones. We've got many of these little recessed fixings all over the car, where if we were doing a more race car style approach, this is all critical. surface area that we wouldn't want steps or holes in so you would have these nice and smooth you would find other ways to attach the panels and again going back to that Valkyrie comparison on a Valkyrie you'll find that all these panels on the the suction side are much much much smoother than what these renders have shown us.

Another detail that really bears talking about here is their implementation of active aerodynamics on the front because I think it's quite an elegant way of having a small aerodynamic device that can have large ramifications. It's essentially this gurney here, which is a small deployable spoiler, if you will, on the underside of the splitter. And when that's deployed, that's obviously going to completely ruin the flow on the back portion of this.

And it's going to disrupt any chance for that flow to get turned up. Obviously, there's some flow that's going through the slot gaps of the wings where we have the different elements. And that flow will still find its way up. But the bulk flow from underneath.

won't go up as much and it's more likely to just go straight under the floor. If it deploys enough, it's hard to get a read on it from front view, but it will also deploy a lot of loss downstream, which will again block up any clean flows to the centerline T-tray, which should decrease front downforce and total downforce across the whole car. So basically it's implementing a very small aerodynamic device to yield quite a large aerodynamic state change.

So this is going to... decrease the front balance on the car, decrease the total downforce, and maybe it would reduce the drag as a result of less expansion up the top and also just less high-end gear getting to the strakes here. So anyway, I think that's quite a neat way of doing it in a pretty simple manner. So going further rearwards, let's talk about the implications of the T-tray further downstream.

So you'll see that obviously the front of the T-tray is clean. There's no strakes or anything like that on that. But as you go further rearwards, we have these outwashing strikes.

It's not unlike what you would see on a Formula One car, but that's just an example where you can see it readily. These are on plenty of race cars. And actually on their little flow graphic, this looks like it might be based off CFD, or if not, it would be based off something pretty close to CFD, where you can see basically this vortex system getting spooled up here. So each one of these.

Strakes will make a vortex, those vortices will combine together and you'll get vorticity along the car, that will generate a bunch of suction on the underfloor and you get downforce. You also note behind the tires, you'll see these two strakes here. Now I think one of the things that's interesting for me here is that these strakes almost look in washing to me.

Typically when you see treatments like this, like I know the newer 911s have a treatment there, it's usually a more out washing treatment where they're just trying to get the rear wheel wake out as hard as possible. These look more in washing so maybe they're just trying to control the trajectory of some of the structures along the back here. Not 100% sure how they'd be using that but it's just something that's worth noting. It's worth noting too that there's not a whole lot of venting from the arch like the wheel guard above there.

There's going to be a little bit of room to flow out air from the wheel well but nothing too crazy. So a lot of it's going to re-enter the floor. And so obviously you see this floor leading edge that's quite soft.

and rolled in that's going to accept any of the flows from either the higher up T-tray or just the bits that are coming along through the wheel arch and then allow that to be picked up by the floor without too much in the way of separations going on at the front. Obviously this whole geometry is going to generate a fair amount of pressure out here. That is a positive thing because A you're going to get more secondary flows through your wheel well so that that will help shade with a brake cooling or anything like that.

But also it's just good to pressurize this area to try and kick that wheel wake outboard. Going further rearwards, you'll again see all these little fastener divots all over the place and lots of split lines. Like I mentioned, I think this is largely a road car detail creeping in.

Although I do wonder with a battery in the midships of the car if they need to have some burst discs or something like that for a safety perspective. And that could explain some of these divots because there does seem to be an awful lot of them. If we keep going back. We eventually get to the diffuser, which seems to have a kick line that starts here. It's quite a mellow angle.

You can see that the diffuser more or less takes shape like that, and then it's got a strake in it further rearwards. It is somewhat interesting to me that in a Top Gear video on it, it was mentioned that Ferrari packaged a tight chassis so they could start the diffuser kick. kick much earlier but the diffuser kick is at least to my mind fairly late compared to some of its competitors so I'm not quite sure what's going on there but I am aware that like say the McLaren W1 things like that they've got the engine tilted forwards a little bit currently to just help with getting a bit more diffuser volume a little bit earlier so that's a trend that's pretty common now across the supercars and hypercars is just getting that bigger diffuser you Obviously one of the things that is going to be limiting that diffuser's expansion is the engine Because even though it's a V6, so it's quite a short engine. It's also quite a wide V. It's a 120 degree V So it's very flat Engine and that means that you can't just go and run up tunnels super high up the side of it It's also worth noting though that it's a hot V engine so exhaust in the center Intake at the outside and that obviously has effects on how you package your diffuser because it changes whether or not your hot manifold, which can be quite bulky in some circumstances, is down the bottom or up high. Even with that though, they have managed to get a reasonable amount of diffuser volume at the exit with a fairly conservative expansion, so I mean, it's going to be a reasonable diffuser, it's just obviously not quite as awe-inspiring as when you go and have a look at like an RB17 or a Valkyrie or that type of setup.

Looking rearwards and higher up, we can talk a little bit about the rear wing. Now it's only a single element rear wing, no multi-element stuff going on here, but it is active. So it can go up and down, it will rest against the more or less the bodywork when it's in the low position. You can see it's got these actuators here. So we'll go up and down and we'll also tilt forwards and backwards.

So you've got active angle of attack and active deployment. Obviously whenever you're on a track you're going to be deployed but then it's going to change the angle of attack. Obviously the two actuators here allow it to push either the whole assembly up and down or to rotate it forwards and backwards. Now most of this wing's shaping is going to be based on aesthetics in terms of how it curves around the car. It's obviously matching up to the boot line and things like that.

It's not strictly speaking the most aerodynamic requirement to have a wing of this shape, but generally it does seem like it's just got a small gurney on the back of it and the profile is probably quite well shaped because it makes a reasonable amount of downforce. You'll note in the center too that they've implemented a little ramp up to fit a lighting unit at the back of the car and I think that's actually a pretty good implementation with respect to running the gurney across the whole wing and then just filling out some of the gurney space rather than say thickening your trailing edge and not having a gurney which would be in my mind a worse implementation than this. Now you'll notice that I haven't commented too much on the body of the car in general and that comes back to the fact that as with a lot of these top-tier hypercars is that most of what you see around this region here is for looks so all the detailing you see around like this sort of ducting how they've done like their lines and their cuts and stuff like that a huge amount of that is down to aesthetics and not necessarily raw functionality engineers have gone through afterwards and obviously shoehorned the functionality inks the car has to perform it has to keep cool and various other things but a lot of this design work is aesthetic design. Another final thing to note that's aerodynamics adjacent is that this car has an active suspension system developed by Multimatic.

It allows control of the ride height. Nothing conceptually new about it, but obviously it's just worth mentioning that this thing has good platform control. Although when you look at the aerodynamics of the car, it doesn't look like a car that's super platform sensitive in the first place, but aerodynamically it's always going to be a benefit to... have better control over the ride of the car.

Well that's all for this video. Thanks for watching. If you liked it don't forget to hit that like button and subscribe to my channel for more content like this. Leave a comment below on what videos you'd like to see next from me and hopefully I'll see you next time.

Transcript for:Ferrari F80 Hypercar Aerodynamics Overview

Transcript for:
Ferrari F80 Hypercar Aerodynamics Overview