James Allison: The man behind Kimi's car

When Kimi Raikkonen announced his Formula 1 return at the end of last year, it was clear that 2012 was going to be a big campaign for the team now known as Lotus.

Not only was it going to be essential that the outfit showed that its sometimes challenging 2011 campaign was just a blip; it was equally clear that it now had a responsibility to ensure that the machinery it put on track was worthy of a former world champion.

The duty to lead the design of that machine falls on the team's highly-rated technical director James Allison, who has had a winter not only addressing the areas where it proved weak last year - but also in getting some clarity on the regulations.

AUTOSPORT spoke to Allison at the launch of the new E20 at Jerez on Monday to find out how car development has come on, his reaction to the banning of his outfit's 'reactive ride' system and why the 2012 exhaust regulations are still up in the air.

Q: Ignoring the changes that have been forced by the tweaks in the regulations, how much of a carry-over has there been from last year's R31 to the new E20?

Raikkonen and Grosjean will drive Allison's (l) car © sutton-images.com

James Allison: It is pretty much like every year. The things that get carried over are things like hydraulic pumps, high-pressure accumulators and aspects of your hydraulic manifold. A certain philosophy always gets carried over, but the car is almost all new, as it is every year. There is always an improvement you can make on almost every component, so beneath the skin there are very few bits that are carried over.

And there is a philosophical change that is quite large as well - not that it is obvious, but our car was laid out for a forward exhaust and you don't just point the exhaust backwards and go, 'alright, that is all done!' It is a substantial change where a lot of things move around for such a big internal change.

However, for this year, the exhaust rules are so different that they are different for everybody, and it gives a chance to reset and have everyone starting on the same baseline again.

Q: Last year you started well but fell away over the course of the season. What have you focused on to ensure you rediscover your form?

JA: I think at the beginning of last year we were quite quick - and in many areas we actually led the rest of the field in terms of how to exploit the regulations from the exhausts. So the use of engine and the use of exhaust was taken to quite an extreme on our car. And that allowed us a good advantage early on, but once other teams caught on to the same sort of approaches, their rearward blowing solution had fundamentally more capabilities than ours did. So that is what left us behind.

Q: How hard was it to deal with what happened last year, when things started well but then fell away?

JA: F1 is a funny thing. There were teams at the start of last year who were finishing ahead of us on track, and yet as far as they were concerned they were having a terrible time. Ferrari, for example, at the beginning of the year was very unhappy with the way its season was going but clearly it had a better car than we had.

The E20 begins the year with rearward-facing exhausts © sutton-images.com

Clearly at the start of the year, we were doing better than expected so we felt great. But F1 is much more about momentum than about absolute achievement, and losing the momentum we had at the beginning of the year was very, very upsetting for everybody in the factory - plus our sponsors and our drivers. You want to always be progressive and it would be extremely satisfying to us if we can bring a car here that can allow us to reset at a good level of performance relative to our expectations. Then, if we can take that forward and develop over the year strongly rather than withering away like we did last year, that will be good.

Q: Will the car in Melbourne be very different from what you are running here?

JA: Yes. The car that you see today necessarily had to be defined quite a long time ago in order to be ready for today. We are just at the beginning of February and the racing season does not start for a while, so there are a whole new set of clothes for the car for the first races, which are quite a lot further on in performance. But that is just what you need to do to stand still. Everyone will do that.

Q: Is there anything on your car that is fundamentally different from what the opposition are doing?

JA: I don't know because I haven't seen anyone else's car, to be honest. But from what I have seen of the cars launched so far, it appears that most people are following a fairly similar philosophy of a fairly tight rear end - a very clear flow to the top and bottom diffusers. The nose is fairly commonly followed throughout the grid, so it is hard to say exactly where our car would be fundamentally different from the other teams.

Q: Were there aspects of last year's car that were actually quite good, but got disguised by the issues you had with the forward-facing exhausts? And were lessons learned from the work you did on the rearward-facing version?

Nick Heidfeld was on the podium in Malaysia last year as the team started well © LAT

JA: This year's exhaust really does not lend itself to have any of last year's detailed ideas carry over. I think last year's experiments for everyone reveal where you would want to get energy to, if you had a free hand. But you don't have a free hand, and I guess what is particularly interesting this year is that there is both a black-and-white regulation on exhaust, and a Technical Directive on exhaust. And the Technical Directive is much more restrictive than the black and white regulation, but nevertheless difficult to interpret because it has a degree of interpretation in it, where we will have to see exactly where the line is...

Q: Is that in terms of angles, geometry, what an exhaust pipe is, where it is blowing?

JA: I think the wording of the Technical Directive says something along the lines that any designs that reingest or redirect exhaust flow for principally aerodynamic reasons will not be permitted.

Q: So if you fire it to a brake duct area then that could be illegal?

JA: The rule itself just determines how big the exhaust has to be, where it connects it, what angles it connects it from. But then the directive says you can satisfy the rule, but if we regard the concept of what you have done as satisfying the rule, but nevertheless done principally for downforce generation, then we might have to take a view on that. I think there will be a degree of jostling to work out where the line of acceptable geometries are.

Q: Is that an area where teams are going to be taking things to the limit?

JA: Absolutely certainly! Why wouldn't you?

Q: But surely exhausts pump gases, so by their very nature will be influencing parts of the car wherever they are aimed...

Charlie Whiting has banned the Lotus reactive ride system © LAT

JA: There is the rub! As you probably know, there was something of a spat last year where many teams felt that what we should do was define a black-and-white rule, and then put into the rule a rule that said if you do it to this geometry, then any aero effect will be considered incidental from the point of view of Article 3.15. So, that was an approach. But that was felt by other teams to perhaps open the door to too many unwanted avenues of development. So what we have is a black-and-white rule and a yet-to-be-determined area where the line lies.

Q: Charlie Whiting is supposed to be coming here to this test. Is it important that teams get an answer this week?

JA: I think the answer will evolve through the year as people nibble away at what is doable and what is not doable.

Q: Talking about another aspect of your car design, is your view now that the so-called 'reactive ride' system is now illegal?

JA: Charlie was fairly unequivocal.

Q: Was it a disappointment for you that you got the go-ahead more than 12 months ago but it was then outlawed recently?

JA: Honestly I think it was just part of the cut-and-thrust of F1 development. It is not without precedent, is it? There are lots and lots of times where we have been the beneficiary of that type of decision and other times when it has gone against us. But it is part of F1. That you try to come up with ideas that are novel interpretations, and Charlie can give you an opinion, but then he can hear other arguments and he can then be swung by those. That is just a genuine part of the sport.

Q: But you didn't view this concept as a golden ticket to success, did you?

Raikkonen got out for a few laps for filming purposes on Monday © LAT

JA: No. But it was a useful thing, and a good bit of engineering. And the people who worked on it did a good job. Long before it broke cover in the press, the entire grid knew what we were up to and several people were very complimentary about it. It was not a new idea, as other people have thought of this before. But actually doing it is different, and it is a good piece of engineering.

Q: What do you think it cost you in terms of manpower and resources?

JA: In terms of designers - it was probably about three or four man months, something like that.

Q: What can you tell us about the stepped noses we are seeing this year?

JA: The reason the noses look the way they are is for safety reasons. Noses have gradually been getting higher and there was a danger that the tip of the nose or the nose structure would actually risk coming above the side of the cockpit in a crash if one car hit another car roundabout mid-section. So it was just a way that the nose part of the structure was low enough that it could not hit the drivers' head if it ran into another car.

But the rule only forces the first few hundred millimetres of the nose to be low, so after that you can put it back to the height you want it to be at. The reason the noses have been going up over the years is that there is downforce to be had from doing that. So, as soon as you can, you go back up to the height that you had before.

Q: From a design viewpoint, how difficult has it been designing the transition, because surely such a step is going to create a lot of turbulence?

JA: Upper surfaces of noses are quite insensitive. It is the lower surfaces of noses where all the action is, and if you look at everyone's lower surfaces they don't have anything ugly happening on them.

Q: Are you intrigued by what McLaren has done? Are they ahead of the game or behind the game?

JA: I don't think they will be either. There is an awfully large number of ways of skinning the cat, and they have had their under-slung nose-flap construction for some while, and they will have just taken that on a stage further. But I think there will be lots of valid solutions honestly.

Q: So what are your goals for this season?

JA: We finished fifth the past couple of years, so the team's goal has to be to finish fourth this year. That will be a substantial achievement. There are no idiots in F1. All the teams are good. And the top four teams from last year are pretty impressive outfits, so coming fourth will be a good solid step forward for the team, and a good platform for us to go on over the next two or three years after that to start to have a proper tilt at the title.

Q: But is finishing fourth much more difficult than finishing fifth?

JA: Fourth is very difficult. It is a tremendously hard step, and coming fourth for the team at this stage in its life would be a very, very good achievement and everybody would be delighted with it.