Haas introduced a B-spec car at Silverstone
Last Sunday's British Grand Prix saw Formula One's American outfit, Haas roll out numerous upgrades ranging from floor body to the engine cover with new package having proved a clear step forward at Silverstone.
Haas kicked off the season with low expectations with new team boss Ayao Komatsu claiming that the American outfit might find itself at the bottom end of the field.
Despite Komatsu’s early assessment, the Kannapolis-based outfit has delivered a strong start to the season, having already collected a total of 27 points , significantly more than its direct rivals, Alpine, Williams and Kick Sauber.
For the last round at Silverstone, Haas brought a major upgrade which centred around a heavily-modified floor and sidepod arrangement. In fact, the package included all-new radiator inlet, floor, diffuser and engine cover.
The entire floor has gone through a modification. The floor body features an altered expansion that "increases the floor suction and therefore the underfloor mass-flow, resulting in overall more load coming from the floor."
The new floor body has a different expansion and therefore required an adaptation of the floor edge wing, which is now more coherent with floor body and is able to extract more flow, resulting in a local load increase.
A totally new floor geometry has led to a major reworking of everything around it. The most visible change is a radiator inlet shape that's deeper than before to clean up airflow to the rear.
The sidepods were equipped with a longer, higher lip. This geometry allows to deliver a cleaner flow to the rear end of the car, resulting in an overall performance increase.
The new sidepod is now able to accommodate some top cooling gills as well which the team can adjust with different panels.
Furthermore, the new sidepod inlet required a new rear stay of the mirror. The updated rear stay of the mirror has changed position and was optimized to condition the top sidepod flow in order to increase the load of the rear end of the car.
Silverstone shots 📸
— MoneyGram Haas F1 Team (@HaasF1Team) July 5, 2024
It wouldn't be the #BritishGP if we didn't have some rain ☔️#HaasF1 pic.twitter.com/RCiLgXgtbp
Speaking of the upgrade package ahead of the Silverstone round, team boss Ayao Komatsu noted: “Our upgrade is still really just putting an overall performance of the car, knowing that certain characteristics through corner balance we need to improve.
“So, if everything works, we should have addressed that here, but we’ll see with the real car on the track. But in terms of if we can improve more in the medium speed compared to high speed, I don’t know, we’ll have to see.
“Honestly, I don’t believe it until we see it on the track, you know, because even our race 5, 6, 7 updates, it didn’t deliver everything.
“You know, it delivered performance, we improved the car that much, we are 100% confident, but it didn’t deliver everything we should have delivered.
“So, again, you know, a bit of the understanding of course goes into this Silverstone package, but again, until I see, until we measure it and then look at it ourselves, I don’t want to count on it.”
