You never know how your egg is boiled until you crack open the shell, and it’s similar with Formula 1 cars.
There’s a reason for everything when it comes to packaging the thousands of parts that make up the car, and things aren’t always as they appear before you break through the shell.
The Side Impact Protection System (SIPS) is, as the name suggests, there to protect the driver in a side impact. This is mainly for accidents involving a side-on impact with a barrier or wall rather than another car, although they will also be of use in that style of accident.
There are two of these that must be placed in a certain position relative to the cockpit opening, one low down and the other higher up. As we can clearly see on the Mercedes, the upper one (red arrow) is entirely separate from the sidepod and used as the rear-view mirror mount. The lower one (blue arrow) is more difficult to spot, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this detail on the sidepod is the outer end of it.
But looking at the Red Bull, we can see the bulge in the body surface for the outer end of the lower SIPS clearly. The illustration shows the outer ends of both the upper and lower SIPS. I have highlighted with a red circle where the end of the upper SIPS should be.
The lower one is between the lower surface of the underfloor and the upper surface of the underfloor and the upper one is between the inner surface of the radiator inlet duct and the upper surface of the sidepod. Both are very neatly packaged between two body surfaces.
On the Ferrari illustration we can only see one, which is nearer to the middle of the sidepod vertically. There are no bumps or bulges for the outer ends of either top or bottom SIPS but they are inside there somewhere. Perhaps this is why the Ferrari sidepods are relatively fairly bulbous in this area?
Mercedes chose to have one of its SIPS ‘cones’ as a standalone component, Red Bull packaged these so tightly that the end of the bottom one needed a bulge, while Ferrari simply enclosed them in bodywork.
As I said, you never know how well the egg is boiled until you crack the shell and it’s too late if it’s not to your liking by then. In the case of these three teams, they didn’t know what the others had come up with until the cars broke cover this season. And relocating the SIPS cones is a very difficult and expensive thing to do.
It would require a revised chassis structure in that area to withstand the loads and also a new underfloor and sidepods. With the budget cap restricting spending, all of that would just be too much.
Packaging an F1 car is no easy task, and we have on occasion seen problems arising from it being a bit too compact. But under normal circumstances, and considering where they are located on the car wrapping things like the SIPS structures as tightly as possible has been the norm for many years.
If I was looking at concepts for next year, it would be a combination of the lower one from Red Bull and the upper one from Mercedes. That doesn’t mean the Ferrari one isn’t the best, but it does look like it makes the sidepod a bit more cumbersome.
So it will be 2023 before we see which of these top three teams went down the right route initially.
