MAKING IT HAPPEN
Taking a brand new F1 car from clean sheet to competitive is a long and stressful road. Five key players from Alpine’s F1 team tell us what it takes
“This is a massive step change, moving from what we’d call a conventional car into a more ‘ground effect’ car. So there’s huge learning everywhere. It’s a whole new regime to learn, and that’s the fun part of it. We’re all here for a challenge, this is a completely different example of one, and they don’t come along all that often. Back when I started [in 1987] the rulebook would have been 20 pages long, now it’s 150 pages plus. And it’s not just aero. It’s a new powertrain for us as well. They get frozen from this year, for three years, so that’s been worked on, too.
“This is a battle that’s been fought for the past few years in simulation, in terms of optimising the aero, the suspension geometry, the stiffnesses... it’s been theoretical, and now we have two tests to understand what we’ve got right and wrong before the season starts. We’ve got a full mapping of the car from the wind tunnel, we’ve run it at every track, we’ve run it in the sim with the drivers looking at set-up. But right now we have no reference. You could get it massively right or massively wrong, which is exciting or nerve-shredding depending on your point of view.
“There are no huge loopholes, but there are little ones that add up. I know what a good downforce development rate is, and what a bad one looks like. But that’s not really a reference because we’ve never had a set of rules this restrictive. I know what we’ve done, but I’m not sure if it’s enough compared with the other teams.
“Every time you read a set of rules you come up with something different. It’s about interpreting them and finding something that gives you better flow structures and more downforce. What you’re dealing with is the wording of the rule, and working out what you can make legal within that.
“As to the reduction in wake turbulence, we’ll see. The thing is, I don’t care. We don’t worry about the following car, we want to make the fastest car. Have we looked at the effect of our car on the one behind? No. What a waste of CFD time.
“This is a team effort. I look back at the decisions we made during the past year and I think we’ve got a lot of them right. Have we gone down a rabbit hole? We’ll find out in a few weeks.”
Rob Cherry RACING CHIEF MECHANIC
“We’d already taken some steps in terms of how we work operationally. Efficiency has always been very important but the preparation ahead of a race is going to be even more crucial now. We have curfews so we can’t just work on into the night – 9pm on Wednesday, on Thursday we can’t fire up until 6am with a curfew of 9pm, and on Friday the cars have to be in parc ferme three hours after the last session stops. That three-hour window is going to be very intense. We’ll be doing more work in less time so we need to ensure the operational side of things is very tight. We’ve strengthened the back of house, so that other power units and gearboxes are being prepared and signed off while work is going on elsewhere on the cars. In other words, if we do need to change a component, it needs to be ready.
“The design office has put a lot of focus on making the car quicker to work on in key areas. Although the engine is new and more complex, we’ve been heavily involved with it from an operational perspective, which is new for the team. All those things you know you’re going to need to change in a hurry has been thought about. We’ve been with them all the way through via a digital mock-up review, highlighting potential problems. You can’t have everything, but it’s been very positive.
“We’ve put more focus on the sub-assembly area in the back of the garage, increased that resource. That’s going to be key.
In a cost cap era, it saves money. We’re identifying and fixing faults before they really exist.”
Ben Morgan SIMULATION SECTION LEADER
“The magnitude of the changes is bigger than anything I’ve experienced before. So much of the car has changed. That really does require an extra level of diligence and focus. And the biggest challenge is that there is no real car, no real components to check we are simulating this new car accurately. We’ve had a virtual simulation for over a year we’ve been using to try to understand the performance level and the behaviour of the car. We work and collaborate with the other groups – suspension, aerodynamics, tyres, the designers, to keep that virtual simulation of the car as up to date as possible with how the car is being developed – in particular, the wind tunnel performance.
“Of course, a lot of it is about correlation and validation, but we can’t do it with this car yet because we have nothing to correlate it with. That’s our biggest challenge, going through this work but without having that feedback loop from the track from the real car that we normally rely on. I guess we’ve got one hand tied behind our back so we’re working hard with the other hand to ensure we’re not missing a trick. We can give very good reads on changes in aerodynamic characteristics. Tyres are more of a challenge because their behaviour is inconsistent. We have a good tyre model, there are some aspects of tyre behaviour we don’t capture so well. The increased weight of the car will make them less nimble, more of a handful in low speed corners.”
Dirk de Beer CHIEF AERODYNAMICIST
“The biggest change is the switch to ground effect. Before, we were much more dominated by the flow coming in from the side and controlling that. Now it’s about going as low as you can and making the flow survive. The lower you go, the better it gets. But that has massive implications for everything else on the car, particularly in the way you operate the car and its handling characteristics in low and high speed corners.
“The regulations are much more restrictive. And also the way they are implemented and checked is very different. That has a profound effect on how we work. It’s a whole new era of complication, in terms of checking that something you have designed is legal. The previous rules have been built up year upon year, and in effect that rulebook has been thrown away. So there are areas that are confusing, which is a consequence of doing it differently. It sounds silly, but a lot of the challenge is being sure that what is written actually means what it says.
“The wake structure is certainly very different, but as we extract more aero performance from the car those wake structures are changing from what the rules are trying to achieve. But to be honest, we’re not really interested in how it affects the car behind. We’re focused on making the fastest car within the new regime. What is going to be very dramatic is the relative performance of the cars in terms of high and low speed behaviour through the corners. And ground effect cars by their very nature want to be closer to the ground. It’s a different animal.”
Matt Harman TECHNICAL DIRECTOR
“We started thinking about the car before there were any regulations. We knew roughly what the landscape was going to be, and that it’d involve a very different aerodynamic challenge. We knew we needed to improve the technology of the race car. That is, we needed to provide more aerodynamic real estate for Dirk. But we started with the power unit, how we integrated it in a thermally and structurally efficient manner to provide ultimate freedom to the aerodynamicists.
“We looked at structural stiffness, at its parasitic losses, so it’s not rejecting more heat than it needs to, because that has a big impact on sidepods and bodywork. And also not just the size of the powertrain but its orientation, where we would have our compressor, the plenums and how well optimised they are in the bodywork. We decided the intent of our car – 100 per cent – was to give the aerodynamicists that freedom.
“Having the most powerful engine doesn’t necessarily give you the fastest car, so the conversation has to be balanced. As a works team, it’s a conversation we’re very good at having. We’re constantly talking with all the departments about where we see performance opportunities. We always find areas to exploit within the regulations, even if they were twice as restrictive as they are now. We’re tuned to find ways of differentiating ourselves from the others. It’s what we’re here to do. We’ve developed this car relentlessly and found a lot of ideas and areas to investigate.”