The KEY to unlocking the M16’s performance
Following a brief shakedown at its Silverstone launch on February 3rd, the new M16 enjoyed its first extended run at Jerez last week. Christijan Albers drove the car on Tuesday and again on Thursday morning, while Tiago Monteiro took over testing duties for Thursday afternoon and Friday.
As planned, the new car did not run on Wednesday, a respite which allowed the mechanics to examine it in detail following its first full day on the track. The interim car ran throughout the four days of the test, enabling the team to collect more information.
Jerez was just the start of a thorough pre-season test programme that continues this week with more running at Valencia, followed by Barcelona next week. As preparations for the first race in Bahrain intensify, there’s no time to be wasted.
The good news is that the M16 has thus far been devoid of any major problems, allowing the team to focus on gathering vital set-up data. While the car itself has been trucked from Jerez to Valencia, Technical Director James Key and his engineering colleagues dashed back to MF1 Racing’s Silverstone base for a full debrief and additional planning. The tech boss will be back in Spain by Monday night, albeit with some new bits in his hand luggage.
“We’re very happy with the progress we’ve been making,” says Key of the Jerez outing. “Thankfully, we didn’t have any major issues with the new car. Reliability was good for all three days of running and we did over 70 laps on each day. By the end of the week, we’d made a fair amount of headway into setting the car up and finding more ways to get better times out of it. In that respect, I’m very satisfied.
“We booked the four days (at Jerez), but we only planned to run the M16 for three of them. We had scheduled to skip the second day so that we could do any work we needed to on the new car, rather than rush through the night before. It proved to be quite a useful day, so we’re glad we did that.”
Testing isn’t just about pounding out lap after lap, trying to set the quickest times. No, in order to make it work properly, a team must know what it’s looking for and use its time - and mileage - as efficiently as possible. In that respect, MF1 was blessed with mechanical good fortune.
“The biggest relief is that we’ve maintained our reliability, which is really good news, because one of the objectives with the new car was to make sure we retained our solid record from last year. The cooling system is working the way we hoped it would and the numbers we expected from the car’s data system, in terms of chassis and aerodynamics, add up as well - although you always have to keep re-evaluating these things.
“The car is pretty much doing what we expected it to, but having said that, I think we’ve got more work to do at this stage, because I think we can find some more performance still. We were aware at the outset that the car might have a few unique handling characteristics, but you can never tell until you go track testing. Some of these characteristics have come to light and they need to be looked at to help us develop the car further. We’ve got a little bit of work to do on that, which we’re undertaking now at the factory.”
The drivers will have a specific programme to run through during their four days at Valencia, commencing on Tuesday.
“Now that we’ve run the car, we’ve established a direction in terms of developing various attributes. We’ve got new parts coming out to Valencia - some that were following on to the initial build, and some that were fabricated as a reaction to what we found in Jerez. We’ve got a few ideas for set-up, and we need to go tyre testing in more detail.
“We did quite a bit of tyre testing at Jerez with the old interim car, and a little bit on Friday with the new car, but we really need to get stuck into a programme there. Bridgestone has made some good steps forward, so we need to investigate that. And we need to start getting into race simulation mode and that sort of thing fairly soon, as well.”
