Formula One car development blog

In a last effort to further improve their 2007 challenger, Williams have now also adopted the bridged front wing idea. After introducing their fully stacked wing (with upper elements connecting to the nose) and updating it (apart from track modifications) twice in the season, the engineers at Grove developed this new front wing. You can notice that in the middle section the wing will in fact produce lift which could, combined with the downforce generated at the outer edges decrease ... Read more

As an upper midfield team these days, Williams is closely looking at the solution of other teams to solve their own problems. When at the beginning of the season the team introduced their double deck front wing, the upper elements closely resembled those of the championship winning Renault R26. Yet with their French update, the lower mainplane has been modified to be a little more curved and now also looks very similar to the Renault car, this time the R27. However, the upper panels... Read more

In recent years, teams moved from straight, horizontal elements on their rear wings to curves in all possible ways. This year several teams, including McLaren, Red Bull and Renault have opted for simpler wings in their medium downforce configurations. Williams and Ferrari on the other hand are the exemptions on this rule. The British team have now developed a wing that sweeps up in the centre of the car. It mimics the design of a Renault wing at Bahrain 2006. The design aims to gene... Read more

Having in mind that Malaysia is one of the hottest venues of the year and therefore requiring lots of cooling, one may ask himself why Williams is not opening up their chimney more instead of having the exhaust area decreased. The basic reasoning behind this is the aerodynamic effect of the chimney itself, which by its shape forms a Bernouilli wing. It creates downforce as the air underneath moves faster than above. It is however a questionable approach which Williams is using for s... Read more