Lotus trim tiny rear wing for top speed

Lotus were seen racing at Monza with the smallest rear wing of any car. The team created a Monza-only rear wing, another alteration of the already fairly skinny rear wing seen at Spa-Francorchamps. The wing retains the V-shape in the middle of the wing, but different to most wings, the Monza spec does not extend to the maximum allowed height. Instead the upper flap is trimmed down, before a removable gurney flap was added. The nature of the wing also allowed the team to remove any remaining louvres in the endplates.

Along with these changes, the rear wing also features a single, central support pylon that links to a bridge over the exhaust pipe. It remains to be seen whether this change is permanent, but it's interesting to see the team move away from their asymmetric pylon that connects to the car left of the exhaust pipe towards a commonly seen layout. Note however that the E22 continued to features asymmetric sidepod outlets, the left hand side being much larger than the right to be able to cool the intercooler that sits low down in the left sidepod.

In the end though, it didn't matter much, as once again neither of the Lotus drivers came close to scoring any points. I understand that part of Lotus' lack of top end performance is due to their engine cooling setup, having less capacity and therefore the team's inability to exploit their Renault engine fully. Additionally, cutting rear wing is one thing, but making it this small also virtually eliminates all advantage you can get from DRS, making overtaking equally impossible.