F1 car design in Catia V5 xxi

The airbox opening fades into the headrest area as seen in the below picture. This is my next task.

Offset 3d Curve from the guideline that is the bottom of the airbox

Create a point on the same plane as this line. Make a 3d curve imposing tangency and curvature.

Make the point symmetrical, make another 3d curve, join and smooth.

I think at this point, we return to the surfaces, rather than the closed solid. I'm most interested in the cockpit opening.

Now that I'm pretty confident about the shape of the airbox opening profile, I'll project it onto this surface that was used to cut open the back of the cockpit.

My next goal is to make an offset of the overall airbox profile. I'll project this on to the splitting surface. What I'm after is to create a thin strip all the way around the cockpit that can later make up the edge that will get filleted.

Quick look from the top and adjustments to get it to line up with the earlier created cockpit opening

Now I'll project the earlier created INTERNAL COCKPIT OPENING

I want to combine these guys now.

Make a couple planes to split them

Split

Connect these with 3d curves imposing tangency and curvature.

Project the curves just created onto the surface. These curves must lie on the surface

Join and smooth all

Split the surface with this smoothed curve

If we open up the surfaces used to create the closed solid, we can now see the effect of all this.

Trim them. Now we can see a face all the way around the cockpit

This can now be filleted all the way around

I'm just going to delete these for now, cause I'm not done yet for sure.

Let's take it to the next level. The area surrounding the airbox opening is essentially flat (until we fillet it later)

Project the under airbox line

Split the surface with it

Split it again

And again

Quick mock up, now we're getting somewhere

Little tree reorganization

Now I'd like to define the "bottom" of the internal cockpit opening. Going to use previously made guidelines as a template.

Combine this new guideline with the INTERNAL COCKPIT OPENING profile

Here's a shot of where this is in relation to the rest of the car



Now I've run out of skill and I'm going to need to experiment a bit before describing where I'm going next with this.