Here we are at the start of a new year and it's been a really unusual, unfamiliar but
intense winter development period for this new car.
The decisions taken many, many months ago back at the beginning of the COVID pandemic
where the sport decided quite pragmatically that aspects of the 2020 car would be carried
over into 2021 and so we found ourselves in this very, very unusual position over the
winter of not having all the normal stresses and strains on the organisation of the huge
production effort of making a new chassis, making all the mechanical internals of the
new car because many of those aspects of the W11, our 2020 car, were simply inherited in
2021 by the W12.
So, we didn’t have to make them afresh and that's been a weird feeling for the organisation
not to have that familiar rhythm of the new car in all its glory.
But I say intense, because although bits of this car have carried over the challenge of
getting it ready for a new season has been every bit as difficult as it normally is because
a lot has changed.
Probably the most intense and difficult thing for us is reacting to the aerodynamic changes
that come for 2021.
There was a concern that if we left the aerodynamic development of these cars unchecked then the
performance would just keep increasing as it has been doing it for a number of seasons
now.
It would keep increasing to a level where the cars would just simply outgrow the tyres
and perhaps even aspects of the circuits.
So, there was a good need to bring the performance down a bit from the cars so that they would
be able to go into the new season if 2021 with the mechanical packages designed for
2020, remember, and be confident that the performance of the car would be matched to
the physical infrastructure that the car was built around.
So, four quite significant aerodynamic changes were made last year in anticipation of this
new season.
First and foremost, there has been a triangular cut-out to the edges of the floor in front
of the rear wheels which when you see it you’ll think “That doesn't look that big” but
on its own in its rawest form if you just chop that area off your car it’ll take about
a second a lap away from the car.
Then added to that first change three others came.
The first was that the little fins and flicks that were on the rear brake duct were reduced
in their span just by a few millimetres but again they were very powerful devices and
that change lost a lot of performance from the car.
At the back of the car underneath in the diffuser area the fences that you can see if you peer
up the backend of the car, they were reduced in height so that they can't go as near to
the ground, they can't create as good of an aerodynamic seal to the ground as they did
previously.
And again, they shed a bunch of downforce when they are trimmed upwards.
And then finally the front-end of the floor as you approach where the bargeboards are
if you looked at the 2020 versions of those floors you see that they look a bit like a
venetian blind with lots and lots of slots, an aerodynamic feature there that generates
downforce and all of those slots have been removed for 2021.
The combination of those four effects, even though if you looked at all of them, you think
well that's not so much, the cars look broadly the same.
The combination of those four effects in their rawest form just cut-off and trim back in
a way that the rules require brings the performance of the car way back to sort of somewhere near
2019 levels.
It's been our challenge over the weeks since those rules, the weeks, and months those rules
were set in stone to try to recover as much of the performance as possible.
That has been quite an entertaining ride in the wind tunnel and in CFD to try and make
sure that we get that performance as far as possible back onto the car.
The other thing that we had to deal with is the prospect of running new tyres for 2021.
We got a first glimpse of these new tyres back in Portimão in 2020.
We've had two other occasions where we could test them, and they were in Bahrain and then
in Abu Dhabi the last race of last year.
That's not really very much opportunity to take onboard a new tyre and get ready for
a new season with it because these tyres will affect the way that the car performs and they
affect the way that you have to design the aerodynamic platform and the way that you
have to set up the car.
So it's been a big challenge for us to try and stretch out that testing data that we
had at the tracks last year and to try and make as much as we can out of the tyre data
supplied to us by Pirelli so that we would be ready to really optimise the car around
the characteristics of these new tyres.
New tyres that are designed to help us race safely and fast all the way through the 2021
season.
The cars have got a little bit heavier over the winter.
The tyres, these more durable, more effective tyres are a little bit heavier as a consequence
of bringing that durability and furthermore there was also a weight increase on the chassis
permitted for 2021.
Overall, the cars are about six kilos heavier than their predecessors and we've had to figure
out how to make use of that additional weight.
We were lucky enough that we were one of the cars that was below the 2020 weight limit
and so when the weight limit was raised for 2021 by the three kilos that were not associated
with the tyres it was our challenge to try to figure out how can we invest into our car
that three kilos to get maximum performance from it?
2021 also sadly means that we say goodbye to an old friend from 2020 which was the DAS
system which is a shame for us because that was a useful thing on our car, it brought
us good performance in many tracks last year and so it's with a little bit of sadness that
we say goodbye to it but that's the rules and we go into 2021 with a conventional steering
system like everybody else.
On the Power Unit side of the company, there has also been a significant challenge.
Quite aside from the fact that the push that the power unit company has to find more performance
from their PU, and the intense effort for that behind that, they had to do it in a context
of a rule environment where there is less opportunity for mistakes because in 2020 and
the years previously there were three discrete opportunities in the year where an upgrade
to the PU could arrive.
With each new PU you could have a different design and hopefully bring increasing performance
with every power unit that you brought to the track.
In 2021, you are allowed just one opportunity to put that performance upgrade on the track.
So, you need to know that you can pile as much goodness into that upgrade as possible
and then make it stick because you just get that one shot at it.
That really ramps up the pressure on the PU organisation to make sure that we get as much
as possible from that single opportunity.
So, those are the main technical changes but there is a whole world of change that has
gone on completely separate to that which is every bit as big and which has made the
winter and these past months unbelievably hard work and the biggest of these by far
is trying to assimilate, to understand and assimilate the new financial regulations,
the so called cost cap regulations, to make sure that we can adapt our organisation to
be able to operate within the much tighter confines of this new regulation.
And we have been working on that all the way through 2020 and carried on working through
it over the winter to try and make sure that we've first of all understood what the regulation
was saying, and second of all try to find every opportunity that was presented within
that set of regulations because every regulation brings opportunities once you can see exactly
what they are saying and then to adapt our operation and our company so that we can make
the most from it and to be ready for the challenge of this new era of Formula One operating under
a cost cap.
And that has been a huge body of work that has kept us really on our toes for a long,
long time.
And then another maybe slightly smaller aspect of the new regulations for next year is that
we have now for the first time an allowance of use of our wind tunnels that varies from
competitor to competitor.
We have for many years now been limited in the amount that we were allowed to use the
wind tunnel and the CFD.
The limit in the past has always been the same for all competitors whereas for 2021
that has changed and now we get a different allowance depending on how successful we were
in the previous season.
So, the way that this regulation works is that basically the last placed team in 2020
is allowed their wind tunnel about 20 percent more than the first placed team and everyone
in between is on a sliding scale between that 20 percent and what the first placed team
gets.
So, we were lucky enough to be good last year and unfortunately, we pay the price for that
a little bit in 2021 and beyond because we get to use less of that fundamental asset,
the wind tunnel and the CFD computers compared to our competitors.
But for us the challenge has been, how do we react to this new regulation in the most
positive way?
How can we make sure that we don't get tripped up by it?
And there the challenge has been, well if we are not allowed to use as much of our wind
tunnel and our CFD as we were previously how could we adapt our world so that we get more
and more out of every single opportunity in that wind tunnel.
We only got one run in the wind tunnel, let's make that run as valuable to us as possible.
If we are only allowed to do a small amount of CFD calculation, let's make it so that
the methodology and approach to those CFD calculations are as valuable as possible.
So, we've tried to adapt our approach to this, so we mitigate and maybe even completely offset
the effect of this reduction in the amount that we are allowed to use these fundamental
tools.
So, if you are looking at this new season of 2021 and you are thinking it is just going
to be a carry-over of what we saw in 2020, well, don't be fooled by anyone who is telling
you that.
The rules are very, very different for 2021, the work we've had to do has been very wide
reaching and we hope we have done enough to stay successful but as ever at this time of
year we are just full of the anxiety and excitement of waiting to find out whether all this investment
that we have made into the new car will indeed pay off with a challenger that is capable
of fighting from the front.