The rear wing typically has a much larger aspect ratio and often uses two or more elements to compound the amount of downforce created. The magnitude of the downforce created by the wings or spoilers on a car is dependent primarily on the shape, including surface area, aspect ratio, and cross-section of the device; the device's orientation (or angle of attack); and the speed of the vehicle. A greater angle of attack (or tilt) of the wing or spoiler creates more downforce, which puts more pressure on the rear wheels and creates more drag. Like the front wings, each of these elements can often be adjusted when the car is serviced, before or even during a race, and are the object of constant attention and modification.
Partly as a consequence of rules aimed at reducing downforce from the front and rear wings of F1 cars, several teams have sought to find other places to position wings. Small wings mounted on the rear of the cars' sidepods began to appear in mid-1994 and were virtually standard on all F1 cars until all such devices were outlawed in 2009. Other wings have sprung up in various other places about the car, but these modifications are usually only used at circuits where downforce is most sought, particularly the twisty Hungary and Monaco racetracks.
The 1995 McLaren Mercedes MP4/10 was one of the first cars to feature a "midwing," using a loophole in the regulations to mount a wing on top of the engine cover. This arrangement has since been used by every team on the grid at one time or another, and in the 2007 Monaco Grand Prix all but two teams used them. These midwings are not to be confused either with the roll-hoop mounted cameras which each car carries as standard in all races, or with the bull-horn shaped flow controllers first used by McLaren and since by BMW Sauber, whose primary function is to smooth and redirect the airflow in order to make the rear wing more effective rather than to generate downforce themselves.
A variation on this theme was "X-wings," high wings mounted on the front of the sidepods which used a similar loophole to midwings. These were first used by Tyrrell in 1997 and were last used in the 1998 San Marino Grand Prix, by which time Ferrari, Sauber, Jordan and others had used such an arrangement. However, it was decided they would have to be banned in view of the obstruction they caused during refueling and the risk they posed to the driver should a car roll over. Various other extra wings have been tried from time to time, but nowadays it is more common for teams to seek to improve the performance of the front and rear wings by the use of various flow controllers such as the afore-mentioned "bull-horns" used by McLaren.
This article is based solely on the supplied corpus. No external sources were consulted; claims that could not be substantiated against the corpus were omitted under the drop-the-claim rule.
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