Earlier this year I discovered the Mantium Virtual Racecar Challenge, which is an online aerodynamics competition to design a Formula One car using CFD. The final “race” of the year was a few weeks ago, so I wanted to showcase the car that I’ve designed. I also encourage you to check out the other competitors on the MVRC website and on the F1Technical forums, many of them are very impressive.
The basis of the competition is a simplified version of the current F1 ruleset. The wheels, suspension, survival cell, engine, gearbox, front wing neutral section, and step-floor geometry is standard and provided to each competitor, along with volumes which must contain the bodywork.
The rest of the regulations are pretty straightforward, with few of the complexities that real F1 designers must deal with. Essentially any design is permitted so long as it is contained within the bodywork volumes. My final car design is shown below:
I create the geometry using the online CAD software Onshape, and CFD is run using an OpenFOAM pre/post-processor called MantiumFlow, which is provided with entry to the competition.
My car ended up around -2.1 CL and 1.3 CD, which is decidedly not great. I only just started to figure the car out towards the end, and it became apparent that I was being limited by some of the features that I had designed early on. As you can see in the CFD images below there is also lots of room for optimization, which I’m sure would yield significant improvements.
Velocity streamlines. Nice shot of the outwash from the front wing and the upwash from the rear. 
Velocity on top of the floor. You can see that I was attempting to send flow around the sidepods to the diffuser. This flow was very sensitive to changes on the rest of the car, and you can see that it begins to separate about halfway along. 
Floor velocity. Note the acceleration in the diffuser throat, which generates a lot of downforce. Also some separation along the plank and center of the diffuser, again more optimization is required. 
About 40% of the downforce is generated by the floor. 
Vortex structures on the underbody. 
Vortices on the front wing shown as low pressure regions. 
This image shows significant leakage of the rear tire wake into the diffuser, I suspect this is costing me quite a bit of performance.
I believe the plan for next year’s MVRC is to switch to the new 2022 F1 regulations, which should be interesting since we won’t have any real F1 designs to look at for inspiration. Hopefully I’ll be able to field a more competitive entry, and I’ll post some updates here along the way.