F1 Testing - What are aero rakes?

F1 pre-season testing is officially underway with the start of the televised Bahrain testing week.

Following a private shakedown last month in Barcelona in which very little information was made available to fans, all 11 teams have taken to the Bahrain International Circuit for a three-day testing event this week, before another three-day testing event takes place later this month.

For both of these, at least some live coverage will be provided, while all lap times and information on how many laps each team have run will also be readily available.

And as you're watching highlights of the day's action, or the one hour of live coverage that F1 are providing this week, you might notice something about the cars on the track, other than the massive changes caused by the regulations reset.

Aero rakes are a huge part of pre-season testing, but what are they and what are their function?

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What are aero rakes and why are they important?

Aero rakes resemble metal fences that are mounted on the car. The aero rakes consist of sensors that can measure pressure and temperature, for example, but can also measure how the airflow flows from, for example, the tyres or the front wing.

Teams can compare data from the wind tunnel with data from the aero rakes to come up with a better aerodynamic setup for a particular circuit.

This is going to be particularly important this year, with wholesale aerodynamic regulation changes sweeping into the sport which teams have been working on via their factories, wind tunnels and simulators for much of the last year, but have had limited time out on track up till now.

From the data from the aero rakes, teams can see how different settings change the car's performance.

In this way it can be determined whether, for example, the front wing needs to be adjusted a little for more downforce.

Former Ferrari engineer Rob Smedley explained to F1TV during last year's pre-season testing in Bahrain: "[The] information then goes back to the aerodynamics team, and they can then use that data in order to then optimise and improve the upstream flow structure generation.

"The data that comes back from the aero rakes is very quick - it’s almost real time. Teams have developed software that takes the raw data and spits out these really interesting images and video files.

"Some of the stuff, you can act on immediately. So if you’re doing a ‘front wing polar’, for example, which means stepping through from a low angle up to the maximum angle of the front wing, then we’re able to see if that front polar is healthy. Or we can see if there’s a point where the front wing ‘falls over’, as we term it, where we’re not generating the downforce on the front anymore. You might be getting a stall or a semi-stall, and at that point, the information from the aero rakes is telling the race engineers to stay away from that area of running the car.

"Equally, there are sometimes more fundamental things that we pick up from the aero rakes that we can’t solve at the track, and that then goes back to the aerodynamics team and they can deliberate on how to solve these fundamental problems and to put these flow structures in a more optimised position."

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