Minardi F1 Team of Faenza in Italy has recently signed an agreement to qualify the CD adapco Group as its technical partner and official supplier of simulation software.

CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) plays a fundamental role in the design and development of modern F1 cars and the Minardi F1 Team will use the leading CFD code STAR-CD and the expert system tool es-aero for the aerodynamic development of aerodynamic components.

"Some of the parameters we used for the evaluation of CD adapco’s solutions (STAR-CD and es-aero), which won over other proposals, were technical support, competence in external aerodynamics and the ability to work in partnership with hardware vendors,” commented Ing. Gabriele Tredozi, Technical Director of the Minardi F1 Team, “Most of all, we appreciated the unique capability of the es-aero expert tool to deal with complex shapes like F1 cars with a reasonable hardware resource consumption in terms of CPU and RAM. Finally, CAD cleaning options like surface wrapping were judged as an important productivity boost.”

The ability to simulate the behavior and performance of designs very quickly is also a very important consideration for a successful design. “It is very important for a team like Minardi striving to compete in the F1 world to get fast responses in terms of meshing and computational time, and the CD adapco Group is now supplying us with what we need," added Ing. Tredozi.