It is super inspiring to see, it gets you excited, we've got new bits coming.
So, to outline the steps when bringing an upgrade to the circuit, you obviously have
to put together a bit of a plan as to what things you want to work on.
As a simple rule of a thumb the bigger the bit you are trying to change the longer it
is going to take to make.
Equally is the part you are making quite a critical structural part and I am sure for
most teams the front and rear wings are highly structural components, they are highly loaded,
they have to be restricted to various tests, that are performed on them to meet the regulations,
and so those components tend to get defined quite early.
Then you would be looking at something like the floor and the main diffusor that again
can be a long lead time item and then you get into the bits that are actually probably
going to bring a lot more of the performance around sort of bits like brake ducts and bargeboards
and maybe even engine covers and those things.
They are a bit quicker to make, so we would be doing those last.
It’s also important to understand is the parts that get brought to the car and the
parts that are ultimately seen and we’ll look at, it's worth remembering that they
are just the tip of the iceberg of solutions and things that were tried in the development
and so what you actually see is only one of maybe a thousand different solutions that
were firstly tried in CFD and then that was whittled down to a number of solutions that
would have been tried in a wind tunnel and then only one of those solutions persists
through to the circuit as the best option.
We've done a lot of testing before they go to the circuit but you never can fully replicate
what you see on the circuit so we also need to make sure that those components will survive.
When choosing an upgrade, you are going to focus on those areas were you think you are
going to get the most performance as quickly as possible.
I think that's always going to be the strategy a team takes because it is about the area
under the curve, it is how fast can you be as quickly as possible that makes the differences,
it's no good doing an amazing upgrade for the last race of the year having done nothing
all year that puts you one second faster than all of your competitors if you have spent
all year being slower than them.
Equally if you upgrade in tiny little steps of the year you never make a big step forward,
so it is always a balance between where you go looking and how big a project you take
on.
It's worth mentioning that lots and lots of options have been tried, every little detail
you see you know a hundred brothers and sisters that went with it to try and make that exact
change work and there is numerous amounts of people involved, hours and hours and hours
of work involved in making those little details and perfecting those designs.
And it is surprising you know when you hear people say: Oh, you have only done one version
because that is what the upgrade was.
Of course for us it is obvious there are sort of hundreds and thousands of versions behind
that and none of those were ever seen and we learn a lot from the ones that don’t
work, that’s how we get better and ultimately come up with solutions that do work that we
bring to the track.
The first time you get on the track it is really difficult to feel the car being really
different because you end up just going faster.
So, you get an upgrade and you have a few points of more front downforce for example
it could almost be the same as adding front wing.
It can be disguised in the balance.
The areas that you do often notice is if the rear is more stable so if you get more rear
downforce that is often the one that you perhaps notice the most.
And most often you get an upgrade going to a different track it is hard to feel straight
away that something has been added to the car.
So it's not always easy to feel it, but there is a huge amount of work that goes into it,
so much detail, so much design, and the build process, it depends of how big an upgrade
it is.
Maybe something you get upgrades that are a tenth of a second, sometimes they are a
few tenths of a second.
So, upgrades on the car tend to be both external, which we can see on TV being aero parts, and
also internal, it could be an engine or a gearbox or cooling system and what we find
often is little small things we can do.
Again that is probably quite a similar philosophy a lot of the teams they find little bits that
are quite easy to implement which we bring in between our main upgrades.
The most interesting area for upgrades is the engine.
All the action happens in the combustion chambers.
It can be quite frustrating as a fan to say there is a new engine coming for a team and
they are expecting a performance step but really it just looks exactly the same as the
old one.
The engineers that worked on it know that 30-40% of the parts are all new and it is
all different but of course outwardly it looks the same.
So, it's always quite interesting if you get some new innovation, last year we ran the
DAS steering system that we developed.
That was only made visible by the fact the drivers were moving the steering wheel backwards
and forwards and it caused quite a sensation and there was quite a lot of interest in that.
It's good in a way that the drivers were doing something different on the steering wheel
because it really brought to life something to be honest was completely invisible to anyone
from the outside world.
There is lots of little things like that on all of these cars that the teams protect really,
really protect to make sure that their main competitors don’t find out.
If you do have a failed upgrade all is not lost because there is also the opportunity
to learn a lot from that and if you take the opportunity to understand why something hasn’t
worked then what would seem like a failure can actually be turned quite quickly into
success and you will see value in the future on subsequent upgrades so when something is
taken off and feels like a failure we always find a way generally to turn that back into
a success at some point.
I would have told them what things we are testing, the reasons for those things, the
feedback that we are going to need and how important the run plan is in order to get
the feedback on those components.
I am very much in the loop where we are designing, where we are going, things that are coming
we are told every weekend, what new parts we may or may not have.
We've discovered it is more important quality over quantity.
It must have been a couple of years ago, maybe 2019, a huge amount of work, hundreds and
hundreds of hours went into bringing an upgrade package and I think it was supposed to be
around three tenths and it didn’t work.
We couldn’t figure out why, upgrades don’t always work, correlation between the wind
tunnel and real life, it is really, really difficult to get accurate and it took us a
lot of work to find a way there is a different configuration the car needed in order for
that to work and then they had to reconfig what was on the wind tunnel and eventually
we got the performance out but it is not as easy as just putting a wing on and just going
faster because all these different elements interacting with other elements.
There are four challenges, to upgrading the car in 2021.
The first one is the homologation rules, which limit the parts of the cars that we can change.
The second one is the aero testing restrictions, so those restrictions become more severe the
quicker the car you had last year.
We're also in a position of having been the team that won last year's championship we
have the fewest runs in CFD, the fewest runs in the wind tunnel and that's something else
we've got to factor in.
The third one is the cost cap so obviously under the cost cap you've got to think carefully
about all what you are doing.
And the final one is balancing the 2021 car and the 2022 car which is a huge regulation
change.
A set of regulation changes that are not only different in the car we are going to end up
with but also completely different in the way the rules are written and that's a huge
amount of work to get through.
As a result of that we're going to have to make really careful decisions about how much
resources we spend on this year's car versus how much resources we spend on next year's
car.
COVID last year meant, that the new rules that were coming for '21 were pushed back
to '22 and in order to try and safe costs the teams agreed to freeze parts of the car,
or homologate bits of the car.
So, all we were really left with that we can change from last year to this year was two
tokens worth of structural bits plus aerodynamic changes.
On top of this the PU regulations were changed such that the PU could be upgraded once and
once it was upgraded the only changes we could then make were for structural reasons, for
reliability reasons.
As a consequence of that, that meant that we needed to get the car right for race one
and then all that we could do from there was really upgrade aerodynamic bits.
We already know that some of our competitors will have changed their focus to next year
and they will have done that some time ago.
They have given up on this year's championship and put all of their focus into next year.
So we really need to think strategically about how we bring those upgrades and when we should
bring them.
It's not different to what we have done in the past, it is just even harder.
When you go to the factory and you see everyone at their work stations, head down, focussed,
determined, driven, people staying overtime to get projects finished and you see these
CAD drawings or it could just be an idea and then it comes up in a CAD drawing and then
becomes an actual physical piece, it is mind-blowing to see, to see the creative genius of all
these individuals and it is super inspiring to see, it gets you excited, we've got new
bits coming or there might be something that we wanted for time but it takes like months
to build and when you finally get it and you put it to the car and it is something that
you feel like more engine power in the low speed as supposed to high or something like
that, you know, it's amazing.