Sam Michael:
“All of our KERS is contained underneath the chassis. We did that mainly for aerodynamic reasons.
“Previously people had pushed that into the sidepods. But when you do that you affect this undercut, where the sidepod scoops in above the floor, which is very critical. If you package the KERS out there you start pushing this undercut wider and losing downforce.
“So immediately we said we wanted to keep everything inside the chassis and if necessary make the chassis longer. Which is what we did because that’s not really a penalty.”
“The driveshaft angles that we’ve had to put the car through are very extreme. They’re higher angles than anyone’s ever done in Formula 1 before.
“That took a lot of dyno testing, we’ve completed many thousands of kilometres. The first time we started doing tests on the driveshaft was back in June last year. We had a full gearbox and rear end on the dyno by September/October time. We knew by then that we were under control with it.”
However he said the finished design did not force any compromises on rigidity: “The last part of the rear end which was something that was a concern to us to start with was the stiffness.
“But none of the stiffness of the gearbox on all parameters is lower than last year’s car. And once again there’s two or three tricks we had to apply and really take a non-conventional view to F1 suspension design to achieve that.
“As a result we haven’t had any problems with the stiffness of the car.”
Michael pointed out the team have covered 3,800km with the new car and “We’ve had no issues with the transmission, no issues with the rear suspension, no problems at all – which is great.
“The fundamental part of the car is right and it enables us to just concentrate on performance.”
He added: “We’ve had lots of little teething problems and tiny things which take three minutes to fix but have cost us six hours in the garage on some days. There’s been a couple of little, annoying system problems like that, but generally pretty good.”
“One thing that’s very interesting about Formula 1 now is that if you look at the cars, there’s some very interesting concepts out there. And the reason why is because the rules have been restrained so much on bodywork, and you can do very little on the diffuser now, teams have had to push very hard in other areas and take much bigger risks than they would have done in the past.
“The interesting designs for me are, obviously you’ve got the Williams tight rear end, you’ve got the double floor on the Toro Rosso, the forward exhaust on the Renault – these are all things that, potentially, some of them you could have done before.
“But you didn’t because there was much bigger gains for much lower risk. And I think that’s great for Formula 1 because the cars don’t look the same, they do look different, and everyone’s trying different concepts.”
