GP4: 1996 Sauber C15 walkaround part 2

Part 1 of my 1996 Sauber C15 walkaround for GP4 is here: Part 1

I wanted to start off by showing the detail on the front end-plate. There is a small lip that extends to its widest point at the bottom which then curves in towards the car before it bends back out again at the back of the endplate.

One of the new regulations was that all endplates should have rounded top front edges to try and minimise punctures during contact.

The front part of the lower front wing element curves up in the middle and is lower on the edges. The trailing edge is flat. As mentioned previously, the upper front wing is a single element, rather than splitting into two elements in 1995.

You can see the single keel, the bump under the nose that connects the lower suspension arm, a solution employed by most teams who have adopted a high nose concept.

By this stage, I was making my own suspension elements. You can see that the polygons are actually attached to the car on the upper front arm.

The Sauber features a small bulge on the top of the monocoque which can be quite tricky to keep the normals smooth. The normals are how the light reflects off the car, and having smooth normals means having more polygons around complex curves to ensure the light bounces off it in a natural way. It's quite tricky to get right sometimes, but it's easy to spot a bad job. Back when polygon counts mattered in that you had to keep the count quite low, it was difficult to blend a wish to throw lots of polygons at a part whilst making it playable on a low spec PC.

Thankfully, there were a few more clearer pictures of the cockpit of the Sauber, and I tried to not use generic cockpit parts for the 1996 mod. So every individual dashboard, steering columns and extra buttons and knobs are unique on every GP4 car.

Something I did on the 1995 car was to make the sides of the cockpit quite rounded, so you can see a lot of the polygons have gone into that and the side-head protection to achieve that extra bit of realism there.

The front of the sidepods is quite smooth, but it's not that easy to model. Also with the barge-board there, it's often quite tricky to find photos of what is behind it.

I suppose the rear of the sidepod is a bit more interesting, with the lower part of it having an undercut to maximise that coke bottle effect above the floor/diffuser. The upper part of the sidepod is used essentially as a large wing, so it will slope down at the rear of the sidepods and they will want to maximise the surface area, so that's why you get an extension over the top part of the rear sidepod.

Also for 1996, you have these large winglets just in front of the rear wheels, with the majority of the teams elongating their rear wing end-plates to this winglet. This will stop the wake from the rear tyre from affecting the flow of air to the rear wing. Sauber's solution is quite neat.

Watch out for part 3 tomorrow.