How an astrophysicist helped Alonso win his first F1 title

Former astrophysicist Robin Tuluie recalls how inspiration he took from a model of the John Hancock Tower helped secure Alonso's first title

Renault-F1-driver-celebrates-winning-the-2005-F1-championship

Tuluie's innovation helped power Alonso and Renault to F1 title glory

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Motor sport is littered with iconic eureka moments, when clarity came to the greatest minds to provide a profound racing breakthrough.

Colin Chapman went full-on Archimedes when envisioning a new reclined F1 seating position in the bath, John Barnard was inspired to create the first carbon-composite GP car on a visit to British Aerospace and the Porsche 917K had its rear wing trimmed after engineer John Horsam discovered dead flies spattered over areas of airflow but not the aerodynamic component.

In this month’s edition of Motor Sport, former astrophysicist Robin Tuluie described to Jack Phillips how his own moment of genius helped Fernando Alonso and Renault in their battle against Michael Schumacher’s Ferrari in the world championship – although the ultimate consequence was not envisaged.

From the archive

In transferring from space to speed, Tuluie has largely worked in motor sport organisations as a lateral thinker, given time to mull on some of the more ‘out there’ issues for teams while they gets on with the the day to day running.

Tuluie’s Enstone breakthrough initially came when asked to fix a problem with the wind-tunnel model.

“Dino Toso, our head of aerodynamics, called me about a wind-tunnel instability,” he remembers in our November issue.

“The car bounced laterally and yawed a bit as it was getting up to speed. I looked at this and said, ‘Oh, it’s just like a building in the wind. We just need a tuned mass damper.’

“I knew that because of Neil Peterson, a really phenomenal engineer at [American research corporation] MTS. When you walked into his office there was this model of a building with a tuned mass damper: Neil and his team had invented it for the John Hancock Tower in Boston.”

Michael Schumacher chases Fernando Alonso in the 2005 San Marino GP

Alonso was able to keep ahead of Schumacher in part thank to suspension breakthrough

Damien Meyer/AFP via Getty Images

“We created a little simulation model, utterly basic, just to reproduce it, and optimised the positioning. A few teams from R&D were involved, Frantz Jourda was a model analysis expert we brought over from the mothership at Renault, plus Phil Charles and Dave Hamer who ran the seven-post rig. It made its way into the wind-tunnel car and was just fantastic. It solved the problem.”

It wasn’t long before the solution found its way onto the real thing also:

“Bob Bell then walks into my office, sits down and says, ‘Do you think you can make it work in the car?’ It was a question not of legality, but would it work in the car and will it help? So we turned it sideways, so not for yaw but pitch, put it in the nose on the seven-poster car. It was three-tenths of a second quicker.”

The significant innovation would help Alonso and Renault break the five-year stranglehold of Schumacher and the Scuderia on the world titles – however, like with so many of these F1 breakthroughs, it was eventually outlawed.

“It was declared to the FIA because it was in the crash structure,” says Tuluie, clearly still annoyed. “Then in the middle of 2006 it was a big problem. By a process only known to the FIA it was declared illegal because it moved and had an effect on steadying the car. There was some technical back and forth, but perhaps the most compelling thing is that when you go over a kerb and the wheel goes up in the air, the tuned mass damper moves – but without input from the road.

“The rule is suspension must respond to the forces at the contact patch, so they ruled it illegal. To which I replied, when the car is up in the air the wheel and tyre are a mass suspended from the chassis by a spring and resonate without applied force. In any scenario you can dream up that it was illegal, you have a very equivalent symmetrical argument why it was legal. There were no technical grounds, none whatsoever, that it should have been made illegal.

“The thing is, we were quick. We were competing against the big established teams. We had great drivers and great people; everybody pushed in the same direction. We were doing cutting-edge stuff: the Renault engine was phenomenal, we were doing super work on the chassis side. Put all that together and you don’t have a weak link in the chain. You win the world championship.”