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Team: James Allison (TD), Naoki Tokunaga (DTD), Tim Densham (CD), Dirk De Beer (HA), Gerard Lopez (Chairman), Eric Boullier (TP), Patrick Louis (COO), John Mardle (OD), Steve Nielsen (SD), Alan Permane (CRE)
Drivers: Kimi Räikkönen (7), Romain Grosjean (8)
Vmax Bianchi : 295 km/h Vmax Lotus : 293 km/hKansas wrote:F1PitRadio @F1PitRadio 56s
Bianchi feels "we are very quick to the Lotus" Re: "Yes, we're very quick compared to them, we saw them struggle to get past you"
Could Lotus gear up longer on 7th???
http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/109416Welcome, Nick. There's a lot going on at Lotus at the moment. You've got the double DRS running this weekend. You've got a long wheelbase car, apparently, for Monza. Can you shed a bit of light on your thinking for this final part of 2013 and what kind of statement that makes?
Nick CHESTER: Well, we're still trying to develop very hard to give ourselves a very competitive run until the end of the year. The passive drag reduction system we've been working on for a while. We targeted it for Spa and we've run it through P1 and we've learned some more with it. I don't think we'll carry on through this weekend with it as we didn't get enough dry running to get where we wanted in P1. We are targeting this strong development until the end of the year and the long wheelbase for Monza is part of that. So we are going to keep bringing developments through Monza and then the following races as well. There are certainly developments also planned for Singapore and Korea.
Like everyone else here, you're obviously juggling the requirements of 2014. Do you have what you need to build a winning car in 2014?
NC: Yeah, we do. We started the design very early, we've been designing for over 18 months on the 2014 car. So that's given us a good head start and in a way that's meant that we could develop our 2013 car for longer through the year because we're in such good shape with next year's car. As Pat said it's going to be a very interesting year in 2014. It's the biggest rule change I've seen while I've been in the sport. Trying to optimise a car around what's a very different power plant with very different cooling, it's quite a big challenge. It is going to be interesting.
Q: (Edd Straw - Autosport) Nick, the long wheelbase car, what's the reasoning behind introducing that and how will you be doing it? Do you need to make some monocoque changes or can you do it a slightly easier way?
NC: Well, we've wanted to do it because we've seen there's a performance gain associated with it. The way we're going to do it is with a front suspension change.
Q: But there's homologation to be done?
NC: Yeah, that's already been done.
Q: (Marc Priestley - F1 Times) Question for Nick and Tom: firstly, Tom, both you guys have used this passive DRS-type system on the car today. Tom, do you expect to use it any more this weekend. Nick, you've already clarified that you won't, but is it something that you will continue working on? Do the 2014 rules mean that it's a viable concept to continue developing?
TMcC: So, today we performed a lot of tests on some new parts and the system actually performed better than we were expecting. It's still not at the stage where we think we're going to race it, even though we are pretty tempted at the moment, so there's plenty of engineers looking at a lot of data. We'll make that decision later on tonight. With regards to next year, any system that you can use to help reduce drag will always help you, so yes, it is part of the consideration for next year's car.
NC: And the same for Lotus; obviously anything that drops drag is a useful thing to have, so it's an interesting direction to pursue.
Q: Just for clarity, the reason not to continue with it for the weekend, is that because the downside of it, not switching properly, outweighs the possible gains of having it?
NC: Partly, and also because we didn't have a full dry session, we couldn't get the normal feedback we would like on it and all the measurements we would like, so it just left us a little nervous after P1 that we didn't want to go into the rest of the weekend with something that may give us a problem, particularly when the car's already competitive and we didn't want to risk having a problem in P3 or qualifying with it.
Q: (Edd Straw - Autosport) Nick, the wheelbase change, any concerns that will have a detrimental effect on the good tyre management you've seen from your car? Obviously it will slightly change the way you're loading up the tyres.
NC: Yeah, we don't expect so. If anything, it should make the car a little bit more stable, a little bit easier to drive, it could even give us a small tyre management advantage so we think it's the right thing to do and we're looking forward to bringing it to Monza.
What Raikonen is doing checking his front wing with the torch?stefan_ wrote:Belgium 2013 - Saturday (24.08.2013)
http://i.imgur.com/3AQtEd7.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/l6F4oLn.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/qKs4P5g.jpg
So wheel fairings have also evolved, especially the hot air outletstefan_ wrote:Belgium 2013 - Saturday (24.08.2013)
Was thinking that myself. They say the lotus works better with with hotter tyre temperatures and Spa was a bit cold. Seems a bit amateur to try something like this. Surely they should have known they would be overcooking their brakes , even without this botch job, because of their grid position, being behind cars for a lot of the race. Reminds me of the type of rough upgrade that McLaren did with cutting chunks out of their rear floor.Ral wrote:That seems plausible.
Do you guys think it's possible that's what's caused Raikkonen's brake failure today? He has been struggling to get front tyres up to temp and if they've closed the brake drums to help him with that, it might have been a bit too much?