Q+A with Lotus' Nick Chester
Lotus F1 Technical Director Nick Chester reviews the team’s performance in Germany, analyses the removal of hydraulically interlinked suspension before looking ahead to the Hungarian Grand Prix and beyond to 2015
What’s your view on the weekend in Hockenheim? On the positive side it was a very good race for Pastor, going from nineteenth to twelfth. He drove faultlessly really. He looked after his tyres and we had very low tyre degradation - something of a Lotus F1 Team habit we are pleased to see returning. We didn’t quite have the pace to beat Sergio Perez and Kimi Raikkonen, but we were close to it. If Pastor had a better qualifying he should easily have been in the points, but he drove a good race nonetheless.
How has it been adapting to the departure of hydraulically interlinked suspension? Difficult. I’m sure we struggled with our qualifying pace because of it. Our race pace was better, but maybe that was because we were looking after our tyres well. It’s clear that we had a very developed FRIC or hydraulically linked suspension system, so we’ve got a lot more set-up work to do now to get the most out of the change.
What happened to Romain’s car? It was a failure of the energy store cooling system, which initially resulted in a loss of power for Romain and then we had to switch everything off, meaning his race was over.
Should the tight, twisty nature of the Hungaroring suit the E22? It’s always difficult to predict, but we are going to be running in maximum downforce configuration, which we prefer with this car. It seems to suit us more than low downforce tracks.
We are now past the midway point of the season, how does that change the development process? We’ll obviously have a good go at getting points in Hungary and then after the summer break the development of this car will still continue. There will probably be one more sizeable package of new parts and then a series of smaller, simpler upgrades to bring fairly easy performance towards the end of the season. Looking further ahead, we are already well into the design of next year’s car. It looks quite promising with some very distinctly different features from this year’s car.
How much is the team still learning about the new generation of F1 cars? There is still quite a lot. The changes to the aerodynamic regulations in particular have made development a little trickier. On the other hand we are reasonably on top of the energy management side now. There are always areas you can improve and things that you want to do.
What are the main regulation changes for 2015? For the cars, the main changes will be to the nose and chassis regulations. Noses are set to take on a fairly standard, low design. A change to the skids underneath the floor is quite significant. It’s drawn attention because of the sparks that will be generated by the car, but it will also mean that the car needs to run higher. That is another thing that will be a key factory in aero development. There is also a change to the power unit, with variable trumpets.
The pit crew had long days at Hockenheim working on the cars… This year’s cars are so much more complicated than the previous generation cars. There are simply more parts to be built so they definitely take more time to work on. This is one element where we’re building improvements into next year’s car. It’ll never be easier to work on than a normally aspirated V8-engined car without all the energy recovery systems that we have now, but certainly it will be a step forward in this regard.
How satisfied were you with the very fast pit stops? It’s really satisfying. The crew did a fantastic job with the slowest of our race stops at 2.3 seconds and the fastest at 2.1 seconds. We haven’t had an easy season, but it’s a good illustration of how everyone is fully committed and pushing just as hard as if we were fighting for the title.
