Lotus to include Coanda-style exhaust as part of major Korea update

As AUTOSPORT revealed last month, Lotus is pinning hopes of a late-season surge in form on a raft of developments to its E20.

The team has revealed that these will include the downwashed exhausts - that makes use of the Coanda effect to utilise exhaust gases for a boost to the car's aerodynamics.

Team principal Eric Boullier believes the changes for Korea are significant, as the outfit chases its first win of the season to put itself firmly in the hunt for the title.

"The upgrades for Korea are a big step; it is the opening of a new era for us," he explained.

"We expect that they are going to work, but of course it's always a difficult task to find the correct setup for the car when you are also evaluating new parts."

Technical director James Allison said that work on the new exhausts in the wind tunnel highlighted how much performance his team had been missing in not having the concept used by a number of teams - including Ferrari, McLaren and Sauber.

"We've been ploughing something of a lonely furrow on the circuit with our relatively straightforward, power-maximizing exhaust," he said.

"However, since well before the launch of the E20 and to the present day we've been carrying out parallel developments in our wind tunnel programme based around a Coanda effect exhaust.

"Once we saw the potential gain of the Coanda system surpasses that of our current design it was clear that we needed to implement it, both for the benefit we could get in the last quarter of this season and also for learning experience it presents us for next year.

"We will run our first version of this style of exhaust in Korea."

Allison also revealed that the team's double-DRS, which has proved troublesome to get working properly, will now not return to the car until the young driver test that takes places after the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.

"We haven't had the happiest of introductions with the system," he explained. "It's been harder than I anticipated to make it switch effectively with only the limited opportunity afforded in free practice.

"We're going to take it away, have another think and most likely give it another go in the Abu Dhabi young driver test where we'll have more time to develop it in a systematic fashion."