Getting ready for Imola
After a two-week break, the action gets underway once again at Imola this weekend. Of course, it’s not been much of an Easter holiday for anyone in Grand Prix racing, because any ‘spare’ time during the season is soon filled with wind tunnel running, general R&D work in the factory and, of course, on-track testing.
It’s been a busy period for MF1 Racing, as the team finally got its three M16s back from their long trip to Bahrain, Malaysia and Australia, and squeezed in a two-day test on home ground at Silverstone last week. That was the first chance to try the latest development pieces on the car and generally get ready for the busy start of the European season, which sees three races in four weekends.
“It wasn’t a bad test, really, although the weather conditions weren’t very stable!” remarked Technical Director James Key of the Silverstone outing. “On the first day, we had a bit of a wet track to start with, but it improved and we did some very useful tyre work. We’ve got a new aero package for Imola, which we’ve now run successfully. At first glance, it’s just bit and pieces around the car, but overall, as a system, it’s a good improvement, so we’re pretty happy to go with that spec for Imola.
“We also did some control systems testing on both days – especially the second – to improve certain areas. That actually proved very useful, even in wet conditions, and we learned quite a bit. We had a few technical issues from the first three races to overcome, and the plan is to carry as much of what we learned to Imola.”
One of the main areas of focus has been starts, which have been a major concern thus far. In Bahrain, there was a driveshaft problem; in Malaysia, the drivers did a manual start to ensure reliability; and in Australia the aborted first start had a knock-on effect and meant that the drivers didn’t get away well at the second.
In both the last two races, poor starts allowed the slower Super Aguri cars to get ahead, which in effect ruined the races of both Christijan Albers and Tiago Monteiro. They weren’t the only ones to suffer – even the Honda of Rubens Barrichello got caught behind Takuma Sato in Melbourne – but that doesn’t make the situation any less frustrating.
“Our starts haven’t been great, and at Melbourne we had additional problems because the re-start complicated things. Obviously, after Bahrain, we had a technical issue with the driveshafts that we had to address, so a lot of hard work has gone into that. We’ve now got to return to the point where we can just do the quickest starts possible. We’ve got to get away from that situation of having slower cars in front of us.”
Because the team didn’t test between Malaysia and Australia, it wasn’t able to sample the latest generation of Bridgestone tyres, which worked very well for Toyota and Williams in Australia. MF1 has now been able to catch up with the latest products.
“The rate at which Bridgestone has been producing new sets of tyres has been impressive, and we’ve been able to catch up a little bit on that now, not having tested between the first two flyaway races and Melbourne. So we were able to try the tyre that the other Bridgestone teams have been running, and we’ve got a far better angle on that now. That’s been very good.”
Key is confident the team has made some good overall gains since Australia, but he’s well aware that there is still much to do.
“We’ve made good progress. We’ve got more new parts to come fairly soon, so this is a good first step. It’s very difficult to quantify these things in lap time, because you can do simulations, but it’s never quite the same on the track.
“If no one else developed, it would take us closer to the cars ahead, but of course everyone else is moving ahead, too. This season is all about closing that gap!”
