zgred wrote:
Added 2nd deck element.
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Team: Nick Wirth (TD)
Drivers: Timo Glock (24), Lucas Di Grassi (25), Andy Soucek (test)
zgred wrote:
NIck Wirth wrote:The chassis supplier is us. Nothing to do with engine supplier or fuel supplier. What that means is that we are fixing it for the team. We are not charging the team. It's our responsibility to provide cars that can finish a grand prix. It's down to us.
We are not doing a very good job at the moment, particularly in qualifying, of picking up all the fuel. We are at liberty to carry on doing that [using heavy fuel loads]. That doesn't affect the volume of fuel. But what we are saying is that even if we could pick up every last drop, which we can't at the moment, we've got an issue.
The team still has to put up with its capacity problem for this weekend. Wirth is adamant that there are good reasons why he got it wrong, and his explanation make for fascinating listening.
"Essentially, there are four things that control the size of the fuel tank. There's the technical regulations, the sporting regulations, the fuel density, and the engine consumption. Since we designed the car – we locked the monocoque down on June 22, the day after my anniversary! – all but one of them has changed.
"The one that hasn't changed since the beginning has been Cosworth's numbers. They have been remarkably consistent. They'd been giving us numbers on their race mixtures, and they had also intended to provide a high density fuel, with the engine, as a package. So we took their numbers, and we basically designed the car.
"Because we were a small team, we knew we were going to have to build these cars cheaply. Each of these complete cars that we sell to Virgin Racing is way cheaper than a Bugatti Veyron! This car was designed for the €45m budget cap, and it is cheaper than the Acura sportscar.
"The one parameter we were very concerned with was weight, and therefore [chassis] length. The F1 rules say you can get to a certain width on the fuel tank and you can't go any wider, and practically speaking you get to a certain height and you can't get any higher. So all you can do is go longer.
"I was really worried, having built a long car in the past – the Benetton B199, which wasn't desperately successful – I was not keen to make the car any longer than it should have been.
"Anyway, when we designed the car, we were designing it with high density fuel, a certain set of technical regulations, a certain set of assumed sporting regulations, and an engine consumption. We assumed wrongly, because the sporting regs weren't published at the time, that we would be able to top the car up when we got to the grid. So in our calculations we got that wrong.
"In October the FIA introduced a new crash test with the fuel tank full of water, basically to make sure that the seat back didn't burst with the heavy loads. We had to be sure that there weren't any issues there. We were about three weeks away from our test – in fact I think we were the first people to pass that test of any team. And basically we had to eat a little bit into our fuel volume to make sure we were going to be okay for that test. We couldn't fail it, we couldn't afford to lose a monocoque.
"But the thing that really screwed us was we lost the high density fuel. At the Brazilian GP last year we were told by Cosworth that we were not going to get high density fuel. Again we were three weeks away from the crash test.
"Cosworth at the time were saying we're still working on fuel consumption. So you think, what do we do? We've got people investing in the team, what if we turn round and say we've got the fuel tank wrong? We had to gamble, hoping that Cosworth were going to do better, but they didn't.
"Even with our fuel pick-up problem – it doesn't rain it pours! – we showed we could get to the end in Sepang. Basically with our tank we've been unable to run below 20kgs, so we've been running 20kgs heavy in qualifying the whole time. We did the whole Sepang race from the start to the end on 100 and something kilos – I won't tell you how many – but it was unbelievable. We should have another 20kgs available for this race, so I'm quite excited about that!"
Looks like they're ready to attach that sharkfin to the rearwing a la RB5/6imightbewrong wrote:
Very true.gibells wrote:I'm guessing his 'safety factor' is very close to 1.
