Vettel surprises everyone at Bahrain
Posted on | March 13, 2010 | by James Allen | No Comments
We hoped that we were in for a season of surprises and it has certainly started well with Sebastian Vettel snatching pole for the Bahrain Grand Prix by a healthy margin over the Ferraris of Felipe Massa and Fernando Alonso.
Vettel’s team mate Mark Webber could easily have made it an all Red Bull front row, but he lost a second in the middle sector, which features the fiddly new section of track. He set the fastest third sector time of all.
Pre-season testing made it look like Ferrari and McLaren were in front, although there were signs in Jerez and Barcelona that the Red Bull was quick over a single lap. But what happened today was that the margins between the cars were quite small in the early part of qualifying, but then in Q3 when the track got hot, it also because slippery and the Red Bull handled it better than the rest. McLaren didn’t handle it well at all.
They never looked on the pace today, particularly Jenson Button, who struggled to get into the top ten shootout and ended up 8th. Of course both cars were comfortably fastest through the speed trap, Button was 9kh/h faster than Vettel through there, indicating that the McLaren rear wing is really helping there and also how down on power the Renault is in the back of the Red Bull. If they had got a Mercedes deal I think we might be looking at a rather more one sided championship.
Hamilton’s time is about where the car is at the moment, according to team insiders. And yet the margin was a second, which again was far greater than at the start of qualifying and shows how well Vettel in particular and the Red Bull handled the loss of grip as the temperature went up at the vital moment near the end of the hour.
Mercedes were not quite there either. Rosberg qualified 5th with Schumacher in 7th, illustrating how a lay off of three years has made him “rusty”. I don’t think he expected to be behind Rosberg by as much as he was for most of the session. In the end he got it back to three tenths of a second.
Massa, who has led the most laps of any driver on this track, outpaced Alonso by quite a large margin – 4/10ths. Alonso had been the faster of the two in Q1 and Q2, but the Brazilian had a cleaner lap when the temperatures went up in the final part of the session.
Adrian Sutil and Force India look in good shape. Sutil was third in Q1 and was the only one of the top ten to set his time on the medium tyre, which is a good 6/10ths slower than the super soft. He starts tenth and has the luxury of the more durable race tyre to start with when the car is heavy and then the faster tyre at the end when the car is light and the track rubbered in. Watch out for him tomorrow.
Also Robert Kubica and Renault showed that they are there or thereabouts, getting the other available space in the top ten behind the four leading teams.
Red Bull were not perhaps expecting this performance advantage at this track. It only has one fast corner and they thought it would not play to their strengths. But it bodes well for them for the season. So we now know that the Red Bull goes well on hot tracks. If it is also quick in Melbourne, where the track will be quite cool, then they are in good shape. But Ferrari are stronger in race trim than they appeared in qualifying today and with their adjustable front wing working very well to manage the tyre wear, they are still a major threat to Vettel tomorrow.
BAHRAIN GP – QUALIFYING
1. Vettel Red Bull-Renault 1:55.029 1:53.883 1:54.101
2. Massa Ferrari 1:55.313 1:54.331 1:54.242
3. Alonso Ferrari 1:54.612 1:54.172 1:54.608
4. Hamilton McLaren-Mercedes 1:55.341 1:54.707 1:55.217
5. Rosberg Mercedes 1:55.463 1:54.682 1:55.241
6. Webber Red Bull-Renault 1:55.298 1:54.318 1:55.284
7. Schumacher Mercedes 1:55.593 1:55.105 1:55.524
8. Button McLaren-Mercedes 1:55.715 1:55.168 1:55.672
9. Kubica Renault 1:55.511 1:54.963 1:55.885
10. Sutil Force India-Mercedes 1:55.213 1:54.996 1:56.309
11. Barrichello Williams-Cosworth 1:55.969 1:55.330
12. Liuzzi Force India-Mercedes 1:55.628 1:55.653
13. Hulkenberg Williams-Cosworth 1:56.375 1:55.857
14. de la Rosa Sauber-Ferrari 1:56.428 1:56.237
15. Buemi Toro Rosso-Ferrari 1:56.189 1:56.265
16. Kobayashi Sauber-Ferrari 1:56.541 1:56.270
17. Petrov Renault 1:56.167 1:56.619
18. Alguersuari Toro Rosso-Ferrari 1:57.071
19. Glock Virgin-Cosworth 1:59.728
20. Trulli Lotus-Cosworth 1:59.852
21. Kovalainen Lotus-Cosworth 2:00.313
22. di Grassi Virgin-Cosworth 2:00.587
23. Senna HRT-Cosworth 2:03.240
24. Chandhok HRT-Cosworth 2:04.904
New teams: are they safe to share the track with?
Posted on | March 12, 2010 | by James Allen | 84 Comments
There has been a lot of discussion today in Bahrain about the new teams and their pace, or lack of it.
Today the fastest car, Nico Rosberg’s Mercedes lapped in 1m 55.409 and the slowest, the Hispania of Bruno Senna managed a 2m 06.968, only just over a second faster than the fastest GP2 time today.
Hispania were still building the cars as practice started in Bahrain
The FIA has made it clear that it would like to re-introduce the 107% rule for qualifying, whereby any car which cannot set a time within 107% of the pole is not allowed to race. Senna’s time was outside the 107% time, which is 8 seconds slower, but the Virgin and the Lotus were well inside.
This 107% rule was dropped when qualifying with race fuel on board was introduced, but FIA president Jean Todt has just said that he wants to see it back. But he accepts that there is no way to get the 100% unanimous vote among teams required by the rules in order to make it happen this year. To pass it for 2011 requires just 70% majority, which means all the established teams, leaving the new teams in the minority.
Ferrari team principal Stefano Domenicali is also in favour and believes that it should be pushed through for this season on safety grounds if required.
But there are two fundamental problems with the 107% rule. The first is that it comes at too late a stage in the weekend. The most dangerous time is the first part of qualifying, where the cars are being driven on the limit and you have a combination of inexperienced drivers, high closing speeds and traffic.
The slow cars are eliminated after Q1. To have them in a race where all the cars are fat with fuel at the start and it all takes time to get going, is not so much of a problem. So why allow them on track at the most dangerous time of the weekend in order to stop them being there when everyone is travelling more slowly?
The second problem is that if you say a car travelling at 7% off the pace of the fastest car is a danger, how do you square that with free practice, where you can have some front running cars on low fuel quali simulations while others are full of fuel and lapping five or six seconds slower, as we saw this afternoon? That is almost 7% of difference.
In other words, although it might seem a good time to bring it back, in practice the argument is undermined by the conditions in practice.
There will be discussions and it is quite possible that the rule will return for 2011, more to set a benchmark for future entries than anything else, but I think that the Hispania car will get up to speed in the next few races and will be well inside the cut off anyway. As its driver Karun Chandhok has pointed out, the car is built by Dallara, who build GP2 cars. So with a lot more downforce and almost 200 more horsepower the F1 car must be substantially faster. People are underestimating Hispania. Let’s see where they are in four races time.
If voted in, the 107% rule will apply next year for the team which wins the 13th grid slot, which will go out to tender in a few days.
Ferrari boss on racing Schumacher, tyre and money problems
Posted on | March 12, 2010 | by James Allen | 19 Comments
I had breakfast this morning with Ferrari’s Stefano Domenicali in his office at the track. Well, he invited me for breakfast, but to Italians that means coffee.
The conversation was wide ranging and covered Michael Schumacher’s defection to Mercedes, the new teams, the financial situation in F1 and the serious problem of who will supply tyres to F1 next season.
On Schumacher he said that that it felt “strange” to be racing against him and that he had not yet seen his former colleague at the track, but that he intended to today. “Racing against Ross and Michael is difficult; they are friends of mine,” he said. “I was disappointed (when Schumacher signed for Mercedes) but that’s life. It is strange to see him in grey. We mustn’t forget what we have done together. Now he has a new challenge and we have a new challenge and we must stay in front of him.”
The most pressing problem facing the sport at the moment is to find a new tyre supplier for next season. Many engineers have expressed annoyance that the situation has been allowed to develop to the point where we are in March and still don’t know what tyres the teams will use next year.
Unless Bridgestone can be talked around to continue, this means that the designers will be having to guess many things when laying out the design of next year’s cars. But worse than that, it is too late for a new company to come in and make tyres for next season. Michelin could do it, having been in the sport until relatively recently. But not many people are talking about them at the moment.
For Domenicali there is only one possibility and that is paying Bridgestone for tyres,
“For sure we are late,” he said. “The only possibility not to be late is to keep the same tyres as this year. That’s the pragmatic way. I don’t see the possibility of having the tyres with no payment and that is another problem for the teams. At this stage, I can’t see how it will evolve in a different way. ”
FIA president Jean Todt said today that he can imagine two suppliers battling in f1, but Domenicali said that having a tyre war in F1 “wouldn’t be possible” for next season.
The FIA and FOM both have a stake in this situation and Jean Todt and Bernie Ecclestone were observed in intense discussion with Bridgestone management today attempting to resolve the situation. Bridgestone want money to stay and will need to be provided with an elegant way of reversing their pull out announcement. But it seems that the discussions may also be about what else F1 can offer them, to boost the promotion they get and offset some of the financial side; things like involvement in the FIA Make Roads Safe Campaign.
Domenicali also expressed grave concern about the financial situation in F1, with so few new sponsors coming in over the winter and many smaller teams like Sauber, unsponsored,
“The financial situation is difficult, it’s a real problem,” he said. “There are no big brands that have invested in F1, we are one of the only teams who have good brands that work with us, because they feel loyal to our brand and see a future. It’s a big concern that we need to address. We need to address the show and the model as a business.”
The lack of sponsorship is something that has shocked many F1 insiders. Things may be looking rosy on the track, but behind the scenes there are some problems which need addressing fast.
LG Tech Report Part 1: McLaren wing, Ferrari wheels and cool fuel
Posted on | March 11, 2010 | by James Allen | 145 Comments
Welcome to a new content feature on JA on F1 for this season.
In response to readers’ questions about technical issues in F1, we’ve got together with LG Electronics to produce a technical report which will appear at every Grand Prix, looking at the latest developments, key talking points and practical issues facing the teams. It will be written in layman’s language to provide a window into the often obscure world of F1 Tech.
I will be working with F1 insiders, engineers and a technical artist to demystify the technical story and to bring fans closer to the sport.
To kick the series off, we will look at some of the clever devices, which have got everyone talking ahead of the first race. We’ll look at some issues raised by the refuelling ban and examine what HRT will need to do first as they try to race an untested car.
Technical developments
The technical regulations for F1 have changed since last season, but not by as much as they did from 2008 to 2009. The aerodynamic regulations have stayed pretty much the same. The cars are in many cases longer and wider than last year to accommodate a larger fuel tank, which arises from the ban on refuelling. Instead of carrying a maximum of 90 kilos of fuel, cars will now start the race with around 160 kilos. This means that the weight distribution has to be reconsidered.
It makes for a fiendish challenge for the engineers when setting the cars up, because they need the cars to work the tyres hard on the first lap in qualifying but then, without changing the set up in parc ferme after qualifying, the car must treat the tyres gently over a long run in the race.
The slick front tyres are 25mm narrower than they were last year, but getting the set up right, so that the load is evenly distributed across the four tyres is as important as ever.
To help preserve the tyres, the Front Wing Adjuster will be very important during the races this year. It was made legal last season, but drivers rarely used it. This year those teams that have it are finding it very helpful, particularly with preserving the front tyres.
Using a servo, controlled by a dial on the steering wheel, the wing can be moved by up to 6 degrees and this affects the amount of downforce the front wing produces. It can be used twice per lap and will be used extensively during the race.
It is a difficult thing to get right, without movement you don’t want from the wing, but it counts for a lot and it’s something Ferrari were the first to master with the 2010 cars. By trimming it as the fuel weight burns off, the driver can keep the wear on all four tyres as even as possible.
Another major talking point arising from the winter testing is McLaren’s Rear Wing, which seems to have the ability to cut drag on the straights, giving the car additional extra speed. In Barcelona the McLaren was 5km/h faster through the speed trap than its closest rival.
This is achieved by passing air through a slot in the rear wing (the black line near the bottom of the wing in the picture left), which neutralises the rear wing, cutting the drag. Such a device would also reduce the overall downforce, which would be a bad thing. So switching it on and off when needed on the straights is the key. That is where the question of legality comes in.
The way it works is this: there is a hole in the cockpit to a duct through which the air passes. The driver decides when to open it and he does so with his knee. Air then shoots through the duct in the sharkfin engine cover and exits through a slot in the underside of the rear wing. This causes the airflow under the wing to separate from the wing and this cuts the drag.
The FIA’s Charlie Whiting inspected the wing on Thursday and is satisfied that it is legal, so it is something some other teams will be sure to copy. They are all working on their own versions of it now anyway. The problem is that they cannot make a hole in the cockpit because the rules say you cannot modify the safety cell once the season has started.
Ferrari’s wheel crowns
In a similar vein, Ferrari has also slipped in a clever idea which no-one can fully copy. Aerodynamic appendages attached to wheels, which help clean up the air flow, have been banned. But Ferrari has come up with an ingenious idea, involving two crowns on the wheels, which do part of the job the spinners used to do.
They are legal because they are made of the same material as the wheel. Ferrari only put them on the car at the final Barcelona test. And the clever bit is that, as the wheels are now a homologated item (along with the safety cell and crash structures), the other teams can’t change their wheels to adopt this solution!
Racing an untested car
The new teams have not been able to do as much testing as their established rivals and one team has done no testing at all. The HRT team was only rescued at the 11th hour and their car, built in Italy by Dallara, has yet to turn a wheel before Bahrain. So what will be the priorities for the engineers in those first practice sessions?
Cooling is the first thing to check on Friday morning. A car which overheats will not get far, especially in the heat of Bahrain. If anything the car is likely to be engineered to overcool; with all the uncertainty over this team, the design engineers are likely to have been conservative. However the general rule in F1 is that a car which cools really well is a slow car. Designers want to shrink wrap the bodywork over the car to get the best aerodynamics, so in a really quick car, the bodywork is often no more than 5mm away from the radiators.
Water temperatures typically run to 140 degrees, which is possible because the system is pressurized, while oil temperatures of 115 degrees are acceptable. If the oil gets any hotter than that it loses its lubricating properties and causes damage.
After the cooling has been verified, the engineers will begin the difficult process of learning about the tyres. This is what the other teams have been doing for the last month in testing. It will take HRT several Grand Prix weekends to learn how to set the car up, to get the load evenly balanced across all four tyres and get the correct balance between aero and tyre temperatures. There aren’t too many short cuts here and even very experienced teams can get it wrong. This is a problem Brawn engineered into their car in the second half of last season, for example. The HRT team has hired ex Honda technical director Geoff Willis to help speed up the learning process. Gabriele Tredozzi, formally of Toro Rosso and Minardi, is working for Dallara on the design side.
Getting the electronic systems to work will be another priority, the teams all use the same Microsoft McLaren Electronics ECU and getting that coded to work with all the the other systems on the car, such as the gearbox and the hydraulic systems. HRT will be helped in this by the fact that they are using the same Cosworth engine and Xtrac gearbox elements as Lotus and Virgin. But modern seamless shift gearboxes are fiendishly complicated things. The coding for programming one runs to 50 pages of A3, to get the timing and fail-safes working properly!
Cooling the fuel
One aspect of the refuelling ban which has not had much attention is the danger of the last drops of fuel overheating in the tank towards the end of the race. With the first races taking place in Bahain, Australia and Malaysia, this is an even greater risk. Hot fuel evaporates and in extreme circumstances you get a condition called cavitation, where the fuel boils and air bubbles get into the fuel system, damaging it.
In the days of refuelling, fuel chilled to 10 degrees would be put into the car at a pit stop. Without that luxury, the teams have had work on two areas; insulating the fuel tanks from the engine heat and working with their fuel suppliers to blend the fuel with additives which will stop the fuel from vapourising. Shell in particular have put a huge amount of effort over the winter into blending “cool fuel” for Ferrari, believing this to be a key area.
Bahrain latest: Prost becomes a steward and 107% rule could return,
Posted on | March 11, 2010 | by James Allen | 79 Comments
It’s been a busy day at Bahrain, albeit totally lacking in tension. The drivers and teams all seem very calm ahead of the new season. The new teams are understandably a little more edgy, but generally I am amazed how calm everyone is.
That doesn’t mean that there hasn’t been a lot going on. Alain Prost is to act as a steward this weekend, alongside three of the more traditional steward types, in order to add credibility to penalties handed out to drivers.
Also the World Motor Sport Council has today been discussing the 107% rule and decided to look into reintroducing it, in order to weed out cars which are far too slow in qualifying. Basically any car which did not qualify within 107% of the pole sitter, will not be allowed to start the race. On a track like Barcelona this would mean that if the pole was a 1m 19s lap, cars would have to lap faster than 1m24.3s. We will find out on Saturday how far off the pace the new teams are and how pressing this issue may become.
I understand that the 107 % rule has a lot of support within the FIA. For it to happen this year all the teams would have to agree to it, which the new teams are unlikely to do. For it to happen next year they would need 70% of the teams to agree, which is possible.
In a separate development, there are strong signs from the FIA that they are going to come down very hard on USF1 for failing to make it to the race track. It was discussed at the WMSC and FIA president Jean Todt has been mandated to “take appropriate action”.
Little has been seen of the Hispania team today, the garage doors were shut when I went to look, but it has been confirmed that the car has passed scrutineering and Bruno Senna said that they are planning on going out in the morning to do as many laps as possible. I will post tomorrow on what they will have to do to prepare an untested car for a race.
The debate over the legality of the McLaren rear wing continues. Three teams have spoken to the FIA’s Charlie Whiting, who has inspected the wing today and said that he is entirely satisfied that it is legal. If the other teams choose to protest it after the race on Sunday, it will be up to the stewards to decide whether it is legal, but they will be guided by Whiting’s view, clearly, as assessing these things is his job.
It is emerging that the cleverest thing about this wing is actually something very simple; the airflow from an opening in the cockpit to the slot in the back of the rear wing, is carried down a pipe in the sharkfin engine cover, but it needs to be “switched on” on the straights. To have any kind of mechanical device would be illegal. The solution? It is controlled by the driver’s body. When he moves his left leg in a certain way, it allows air flow through, which shoots into the slot on the back of the wing and separates the airflow underneath the wing, causing it to shed drag, so the car goes faster down the straight. It’s a bit like the brake steer third pedal McLaren had in 1997, but even more simple.
I will post more on this tomorrow.
I’ll be trying out a live Twitter “Ask James” chat at 9-30am UK time on Friday 12 March. You can follow it on my Twitter aggregator site, http://twitter.jamesallenonf1.com/live/askjames.
To send in a question, go to www.twitter.com, then follow @jamesallenonf1 and send me your question. I will try to answer as many as I can in the half hour.
Schumacher and Rosberg mark out their territory
Posted on | March 11, 2010 | by James Allen | 55 Comments
The first day of the new season kicked off with a trip to a Mercedes dealership on a highway out of Bahrain’s capital Manama, to see Michael Schumacher and Nico Rosberg.
This was one of those occasions which was more interesting for what it looked like rather than what was said. It was a bit of a mess organisationally, with the principals over an hour late and then delayed further by a decision to do a TV scrum before the formal press conference, rather than the other way around. So by the end of it we had lost a whole morning and we didn’t get to the track until 12-30.
Anyway, Schumacher looked great; very fit and fresh. Look at his body language in my photo – it’s the classic legs wide, hands on hips stance of Henry VIII or George W Bush – the “I’m the boss here” message.
Alongside him Nico Rosberg looked well groomed and handsome, but you could sense his unease. He knew to expect the, “How can you beat this guy and what will it do to your career if you don’t?” questions, which duly came in.
He handled it quite well with lines like “I aim to look good in comparison with him, whatever that may mean,” but you can also see that he hasn’t yet worked out how to present himself in this situation. What role is he playing?
Most drivers have a clearly understood position and role they play this year; Schumacher is the returning champion, reigniting an old love affair with Mercedes, Alonso is the hungry champion starting a new love affair with Ferrari, Button is the reigning champion taking a very brave gamble by switching teams, Vettel the “man most likely to” and so on.
Rosberg is the guy who like the idea of taking on Button in a Mercedes, but then woke up one morning to find himself under a massive shadow. He’s had some good results in his four seasons in F1, but not enough and he’s not won anything yet. All he can build his persona on is that Ross Brawn really rates him.
So he has to tolerate being ignored by the throngs of media when he does a joint appearance with Schumacher, watch as the cameramen fall over each other to stick themselves with the great champion.
It takes the pressure off in a way, which is probably quite nice, but when the talking starts no-one is asking him positive questions.
The one revealing comment Rosberg made about the Mercedes car was that there is no fundamental imbalance there, it is just a question of aerodynamics, in other words the car is fine it just isn’t fast enough yet, because it lacks downforce. The team has a big update here this weekend so we will see where that puts them.
As for Schumacher he took a very simple line, “I’m back because I missed fighting the guys on the track, ” and you can believe him.
After he won the 2000 world championship for Ferrari, ending their 21 year drought, he said that he had fulifilled the obligation he felt to them and would now race for pleasure.
This time around that is more true than ever. He’s going out there to get some kicks from battles with Alonso and Hamilton because he missed racing and the fire had not gone out.
But this isn’t a vanity project and Mercedes is not a one year programme in his mind. I think he sees them getting stronger than the opposition over the course of this year and into next, so he probably fancies his chances of winning the title next year. He is here to enjoy himself first and foremost.
He got chippy when asked for his children’s thoughts on his decision to race again. My kids are off limits and you would all do well to remember that, was his stern line.
Don’t expect a charm offensive from him. He’s very professional and will meet his media obligations, but he’s not here to communicate, he’s here to race.
VIDEO: What a driver brings to car development
Posted on | March 9, 2010 | by James Allen | 218 Comments
Here on JA on F1, we are always trying to bring content that you the readers have asked for, to answer your questions and help bring you closer to the sport.
One question which we get regularly at this time of year, when the new cars come out for the start of the season, is “How much does the driver bring to the car, in terms of lap time, from his development ability?”
Ever since Fernando Alonso famously claimed to bring 7/10ths of a second to a car in the development stage, there has been a desire to understand what the driver actually does to improve the car in its early days of testing.
So I went behind the scenes at McLaren to make a video on this subject and you may find the answer surprising.
Let me know your feedback.
Cosworth ready for F1 return – JA on F1 behind the scenes
Posted on | March 8, 2010 | by James Allen | 90 Comments
I went up to Cosworth recently to have a look around and find out how the testing has been going. Cosworth is returning to F1 after an absence of three years and in many ways they symbolise the new post-manufacturer F1 era, as the power behind Williams and the new teams.
There was quite a bit of scepticism about Cosworth when the FIA issued its list of new teams accepted for 2010, all of whom would be using Cosworth engines. In some quarters it was suggested that having Cosworth engines was the only way to be accepted, but there were other reasons why some high profile names were rejected. There were also suggestions that the engine would be uncompetitive because technology had moved on and fuel efficiency would be a problem. Although prices are not discussed publicly, the Cosworth package is also believed to be cheaper than the others at around £5 million for the season.
As it has turned out one of the new teams, USF1, will not make it, HRT is arriving in Bahrain with an untested car, while the two other new teams are around four seconds off the pace.
The engine is based on the unit used by Williams in the 2006 season, adapted to run at 18,000 rpm. This season, Cosworth’s flagship team is again Williams and they have been performing pretty well and look like fighting for the “best of the rest” position behind the top four.
“You can’t believe the different culture across the teams we are working with, ” says Cosworth’s Mark Gallager, ” You have the vast experience of Williams, extremely professional, very demanding and with a clear objective to win Grands Prix, right through to teams who haven’t done F1 before and are on a steep learning curve and are asking Cosworth to help them in areas that Williams already knows the answers to.”
Cosworth’s target for the engine was to have the power of Mercedes with the fuel efficiency of Renault and they think that these targets are close to being realised. We will only really find out in the first few races, when we can properly evaluate both in competitive conditions.
In testing the engine was run conservatively to start with, but they managed to cover more than the 2,500 kms life of the engine with the first unit in the Williams, so the whole of the Valencia test and some of the first Jerez test too. It is obvious from the speed trap data that Williams is far faster on the straights than with the Toyota unit last year. In the Barcelona test, the Williams was the third fastest car in Vmax at 308km/h, equal to Ferrari and five km/h slower than McLaren with its magic rear wing.
As the testing has gone on, they have had very impressive reliability, covering 11,336km mainly with Williams, but also with Lotus and Virgin.
Serving four teams is a fair sized logistical exercise; Cosworth was set to produce 100 engines this season; 10 for testing and 80 for racing across the five teams it was supplying. With USF1 out and HRT not testing, that number is now slightly lower, but it’s still a lot of engines.
They are required to supply five engines per team to travel to each Grand Prix, which the teams transport themselves. Cosworth’s on site technical support team at races is 18 people.
One of the advantages Cosworth enjoys this season is that they were able to work on the engine until very recently, whereas engine makers who raced last season have frozen engines.
Gallagher explains how that works,
“We froze the engine on March 1st 2010 and you have to supply the FIA and the other engine makers with a dossier of what you have done to the engine, ” says Gallagher. “It is fixed at that point and you cannot go spending millions of dollars developing the engine for performance. The only thing you can do is ask for a concession if you suffer a reliability issue. In that instance you present your case to the FIA, they share it with the competition and anyone can object. ”
Walking around the facilities, it is just as I remember it from my last visit three years ago, apart from a smart new reception area. The engine build workshop is a buzz of activity with the engines being prepared for Bahrain. They were shipped out last Friday.
I’ve made a video about the new teams, the Resource Restriction Agreement with some behind the scenes material at Cosworth. Click on the link below to watch it.
JA on F1 Cosworth video for FT
Lewis Hamilton admits to ‘lots and lots of mistakes’
Posted on | March 6, 2010 | by James Allen | 209 Comments
In a revealing interview with BBC Radio 5 Live this weekend, Lewis Hamliton has admitted that he has made “lots and lots of mistakes in my career, hopefully this will be a year of a lot fewer!”
It’s very unusual to hear a driver admitting to any mistake, let alone lots of them.
It is criticism that was often leveled at Michael Schumacher and has to a lesser extend been aimed at Hamilton from time to time. This charm offensive marks an interesting change of direction for Hamilton, ahead of what is likely to be another hard fought season.
He has decided to dispense with his father as manager and has taken a very deliberate direction in his pr strategy, to be open about the mistakes of the past, like the way he dealt with Fernando Alonso in 2007 and – without mentioning it specifically – the episode where he lied to stewards in Melbourne last year. He has also been very careful to position himself as someone who respects new team mate Jenson Button and looks up to him in certain respects, like the “way he carries himself”, as he said yesterday. He’s going out of his way to say that he and Button are on the same page, but it will only really mean something when we see their relationship tested in the heat of battle.
He admitted that he read the tea leaves wrongly when he was thrown in alongside Alonso in his rookie season, “At the beginning of my first year I was up alongside the two-time world champion and he was seen as the guy to win the world championship and I think at the time I misinterpreted and misunderstood the goals and the understanding of how the team worked.
This rather vague sentence would appear to be a reference to the idea that the team took sides in 2007 and were pulled into doing so by the drivers, Hamilton determined to fight his corner because he and his father were of the mindset that you may never get another chance to win a world title so you should take it when presented. Alonso was seen as the guy to get the championship, but Hamilton didn’t see the need to let him through once he got ahead in the points early on.
He goes on, “But since I’ve been here they do everything to give us individually the best package possible. I’ve never had more than the guy next to me, we’ve always had equal opportunity, which is the greatest thing in a team.”
I think this is broadly true; there was a time last season in Budapest that he got a new front wing for qualifying and the race of which there was only one and went on to win the race with it.
He has also had a lot to say lately about the prospect of racing against Michael Schumacher, largely talking in awed tones about the seven times champion.
In this interview, however, he chucks a new card onto the table, suggesting that this is an old Schumacher that he will be racing against, not the man in his prime,
“It’s different to having the young Michael, who’s at his best,” he says, before going on to add, “But I’m sure he’s going to be just as good as ever, ” to tone the comment down a little.
Interesting times. There is no doubt that this is the most exciting driver and team line up for years and speaking to the drivers and teams at the moment, you get the clear sense that they are as excited about the new season as the rest of us.
One week from now we will know the grid for the first race. Bring it on.
Virgin Racing’s secret: Behind the scenes at Wirth Research
Posted on | March 5, 2010 | by James Allen | 134 Comments
Of the new teams in Formula 1 it looks as though the radical Virgin Racing car is probably going to be the fastest, once it hits its stride, but preparations for the season have been undermined somewhat by reliability problems in testing.
The car has been unable to hold on to its hydraulic fluid and during its first test a front wing fell off. This has been a little embarrassing for technical director Nick Wirth, who has staked his reputation on a car which has never been anywhere near a wind tunnel, but instead was designed only using CFD or Computational Fluid Dynamics, a highly sophisticated 3D computer system.
Yesterday I went to the headquarters of Wirth Research to find out more about the reliability problems and to look more closely at whether Wirth’s plan of doing a CFD-only car will work.
Wirth is someone who sees and does things slightly differently. There are many photos on the wall, but they are of The Who and Oasis, rather than racing cars.
The whole Virgin team is operating out of Wirth’s premises on an industrial estate in Bicester at the moment. The race team will shift to the Manor team base in Sheffield after the Chinese Grand Prix, but for now the cars are being built up at Wirth, which makes sense with the tight turnarounds before the first race.
Currently spread across six buildings, Wirth Research also needs more space and in the enforced summer F1 shutdown period will be moving to a new base where all departments can be under one roof.
There are many familiar faces from other teams, a few ex Renault engineers, David Coulthard’s number one mechanic from Red Bull days, all experienced pros.
Wirth employs 120 people and the F1 programme is only part of what they do here, he has research and development contracts with Honda, Michelin, FIA and Porsche, who came to to them after being beaten by Wirth’s Honda car in ALMS. One of the recent programmes was to solve an aerodynamic problem for the IRL to prevent cars from getting airborne, which has now also been applied to sports cars.
Wirth’s pitch is that he has been focussing on the technology which makes a difference, particularly in the simulation world. He has two simulators here and I was allowed in to see the new one. It’s the first time I’ve seen a 3D F1 simulator up close and it looks a but like those ride simulators you find at the Science Museum or at shows – a pod on top of hydraulic rams, standing six feet off the ground. Both Timo Glock and Lucas di Grassi were there when I visited, correlating data from the recent Barcelona test and testing the Bahrain update kit.
The pod pitches and bucks as the car goes round the virtual Barcelona circuit. When the driver hits the brakes at the end of the main straight, the nose goes down probably a metre, it’s pretty violent. I noticed the rear end twitch in the high speed Turn 3. The virtual front wheels are visible on the screen, but there are no wishbones connecting them to the pod, which is the only thing that does not look 100% realistic – the rest is just spooky. Thanks to his work with Michelin, Wirth has devoted a lot of time to modelling tyre performance, which is the hardest thing to simulate.
I also tried on a virtual reality headset and standing in an office, was able to walk around the car and nose around the cockpit, as if I was standing next to it in the pit lane. It was uncanny. Even the wing mirrors worked!
Wirth’s plan for CFD-only design came from witnessing years of wastefulness in windtunnels, where £30,000 worth of 60% scale models are routinely built, tested and then thrown away every day. Many teams employ 140 people including model makers to do windtunnel research and Wirth decided that it could be dispensed with when he developed the 2008 Honda LMP2 car. The Eureka moment was when he realised that the CFD numbers were more accurate than the wind tunnel. Honda are convinced by it. He claims that the Virgin F1 car track data is closer in reality to the CFD numbers than any car he’s built before.
The Virgin car is around 4 seconds off the pace of the front running cars at this stage. In his view, the car lacks aerodynamic refinement compared to the Ferraris and McLarens because it is the first product from the design team, “We just lack experience compared to the fantastically clever people out there” – not because of the limitations of the CFD process. And just as the team at Force India has designed a much more aero efficient car with each passing year, so will Wirth’s designers. They have an aggressive development programme for this season so it will be interesting to see how far they are off the pace at the end of the season.
The design of the monocoque was frozen in June last year, probably three months earlier than the top teams who have greater resources and experience in manufacture. The team has a strict budget of €45 million all in and so far has hit all the deadlines it set itself. It will travel to Bahrain with two cars and a spare monocoque as well as five sets of spares for most parts. Wirth says that the troublesome differential, which has been causing the hydraulic leaks and destroyed their Barcelona test, has been fixed. There were quality control problems causing it to crack. But new spec ones are in short supply, so the drivers had better not crash into the barriers backwards before the race..
The front wing collapse was a “design error” by his drawing office team, for which he puts up his hands and accepts full blame.
“The drivers know that underneath them they have quite a good car,” he says. “Timo hopped out of the car and said ‘It’s doing what you said it would do.’ We have an exciting development programme, we should be able to bring a lot of performance to the car. We have a big update for Bahrain and more for Melbourne. There is a healthy development budget.
“I would like to show during the course of the year that we can close the gap on the weakest of the existing teams and show that this way of designing cars represents a way forward, ” he said.
Photos by Pip Calvert
March
March 14, Bahrain
March 28, Australia
April
April 4, Malaysia
April 18, China
May
May 9, Spain
May 16, Monaco
May 30, Turkey
June
June 13, Canada
June 27, Valencia
July
July 11 Great Britain
July 25, Germany
August
August 1, Hungary
August 29, Belgium
September
September 12, Italy
September 26, Singapore
October
October 10, Japan
October 24, Korea
November
November 7, Brazil
November 14, Abu Dhabi
from Regal Insurance
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