TECH WEEKLY: How F1 teams balanced cooling and downforce in Hungary – and where McLaren made the difference
It was another intriguing weekend at the Hungaroring from a technical perspective, as Mark Hughes explains and Giorgio Piola illustrates.
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The Hungaroring presents a potentially tricky combination of demands, given that it’s a track which heavily rewards raw downforce but which can have very high cooling demands.
The combination of a Budapest summer with the relative lack of straight-line running, plus long corners where the front wheels are on lock for a long time, diverting airflow away from the radiator inlets, means that the bodywork will have to be opened up extensively.
This extracts a high cost aerodynamically. So, the conflict in demands and the jeopardy involved in trying to maximise performance, is quite explicit.
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