FIA hope to see 50% visibility improvement with wet-weather wheel arches

The FIA believes that new wet-weather wheel arches will bring a 50% improvement in visibility to avoid situations like the 2021 Belgian Grand Prix.

The event at Spa proved to be a farcical one with the race lasting a total of three laps, all of which came behind the Safety Car.

Thankfully, the weather was a little kinder in 2022 but there were still wet races, most notably in Monaco and at Suzuka.

While grip remains an issue in wet weather conditions, one of the biggest problems is with visibility as the spray that comes up from the wheels proves to make driving very difficult for cars close behind.

In order to combat this, the FIA have begun trialling wheel arches which they hope will prevent high amounts of spray during wet conditions.

“We only think it’s going to be something that gets used on a couple of occasions a year, maybe three, that sort of thing,” the FIA’s single-seater technical director Nikolas Tombazis said, as per Autosport.

“We don’t want it to be that every time there’s a drop of rain, then suddenly you have to fit these things.

“Once we have a solution, we’ll get to do some prototypes and run them on some cars to try and evaluate that properly.

“I’m expecting that it’s going to be a maybe 50% improvement kind of thing.”

Tombazis admitted that the 2021 Belgian Grand Prix “left scars on the sport” and said with the amount of people watching both on TV and in the stands, they have a responsibility to get the cars racing.

“Spa in 2021 still left scars on the sport because it was very unfortunate circumstances,” he said. “It would have been 10 times worse I think if we had gone all the way to Japan and had to pack up and come back. We really need to avoid that.

“We have so many people watching, spectators paying tickets, teams travelling all over the world, and then to suddenly say we can’t race is not very responsible of us.”

Another criticism of the FIA’s reaction to wet conditions has been the seeming unwillingness to start a race on wet tyres with the race director instead waiting for conditions to ease before getting the grand prix underway.

Tombazis said the new inventions will make racing on the wet tyre more likely whilst hardly affecting the overall aerodynamics.

“I think it will bring the raceable conditions from what is maybe currently intermediate tyres, as you almost never race with the wet tyres, I think it’ll bring it well into the wet tyre territory.

“We have done a lot of CFD simulations, because we want to make sure the effect of these devices is relatively small on the overall aerodynamics. There still is an effect, but not a massive one.

“Also, we are simulating the droplets of the rain and so on, and seeing how it affects spray. What is a bit of a challenge in the simulations is to determine the relative proportion of what comes from the diffuser to what comes from the tyres.”

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