Has Williams used Lowe as a scapegoat?



Williams seems to have got rid of Paddy Lowe. Is he to blame for the team's problems, or is it too easy just to point the finger at one person?
Javier Lopez, via email

It is never the fault of any one person, but being technical director puts you in the firing line if the car doesn't achieve the success the team expects.

Getting a car built on time is no easy matter and is down to a lot of planning, starting something like four months before the car needs to sit on the ground.

To keep this all rolling, you need a production manager that works from that planning spreadsheet on a daily basis and a drawing office manager to make sure the designers are releasing the drawings on schedule. Neither of those roles should be the job of the technical director.

This is not the first time Williams has built a car to these regulations, so it should have a reasonable structure in place to achieve a typical car build process. Yes, year on year the cars get more complicated, as Lowe pointed out, but team personnel are involved on a day-to-day basis so they should be capable of keeping up with the extra complexity of a current Formula 1 car.

The technical director needs to be aware of hold-ups or delays and must be involved in making any compromises required to meet the deadlines. But they should be the visionary for the project, and their designers and engineers are the achievers.

They need to have the time to focus on the performance of the car and if there is a problem in optimising a particular component then they will make the decision about what specification should be released for manufacture to allow the team to achieve its goal of getting the car to the first test. Development can follow after that, as we saw from Mercedes.

I don't think Lowe's fall from grace was really about the car not making it to the first test on time. That was probably the last nail in the coffin, but the issue was more about the performance. From what I've heard about last year's car, there were some planned large steps in performance promised around mid-season that never happened.

Its 2018 performances numbers show Williams was an average of 3.47% off in races two to five and +3.58% in the final races of the season. So we didn't see any improvement.

Over the winter the team will naturally have had lofty ambitions about performance, but from the test times and what the drivers have said about the car those do not appear to have been achieved.

Frank Williams, although not directly involved on a daily basis, is a racer and it runs in the family - and I include Patrick Head in that family. They don't like running around at the back of the field, although they accept that not everyone can win. But they would like to see some light at the end of the tunnel. At testing at Barcelona, it didn't look like that light was shining very brightly.

Why do the FIA and F1 want standard gearboxes from 2021? What does it mean for works teams?
Vasim Khan, via Twitter

I think they are just exerting some muscle and trying to get the teams to understand that they mean business as far as some sort of a cost cap is concerned.

For every team the gearbox is a very expensive part of the car, and in reality it's invisible to the enthusiast, spectator or viewer.

Since Haas, Sauber and Racing Point all use their engine suppliers' gearboxes and Toro Rosso takes the Red Bull package, development costs are subsidised for Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull - which is a sensible thing to do.

Williams, McLaren and Renault are the only teams using standalone gearbox packages, so this rule would save them a reasonable amount of money.

It's also a component that can very easily lose you a race but it would need to be very special to win you a race. With the regulations as they are, there's no real room for much more innovation.

The tender is only for the actual gear cluster and gearchange that fits inside a team's own carbon rear structure, so the teams will still be able to come up with their own performance-differentiating package there.

It's not a bad idea, but if I were still involved with a team I would be against it, mainly because you have to believe you can create something that's better than your competitors'.

But since so many teams are using other team's gearboxes, that argument doesn't stand up to much scrutiny.

Why do modern F1 cars still have airboxes above the driver's head now that the cars are turbocharged? I thought the airbox was for ramming air into the engines of normally aspirated cars?
Michael Wilczek, via Instagram

You are correct. Airboxes were for increasing the inlet pressure for normally aspirated engines. If it was all working correctly, you could get something like a 20% increase in atmospheric pressure inside the airbox, so from a three-litre engine you were able to produce the power of a 3.6-litre engine.

The same is still true for the turbo engines. Yes, the turbo will make up for a lack of inlet pressure but it will have to work harder to achieve it, wasting some of the exhaust gas energy that can be used for driving the MGU-H, which in turn creates more electrical power.

Also, having the airbox intake where it is means the intake air is clean and cooler than anywhere else around the car.

Teams also use the airbox intake to cool things like the intercooler or hydraulics. Once the turbo is up to speed and can't flow any more air, the excess then spills inside the intake area and flows through whatever is being cooled. This means that any spillage around the sides of the airbox is reduced and with it any problems that might create for the performance of the rear wing.

Will the front wings actually help cars follow closely or are they just as bad for dirty air as last year's spec?
its.Olli3, via Instagram

I'm pretty sure there will be a difference, but I don't think it will be enough to make a significant impact. The leading car will still be creating just as dirty an airflow as it always has, but the following car's front wing is not as sophisticated so will suffer a bit less.

Dare I say it, the change to the DRS is going to be the thing that creates more overtaking. Closed, the rear wing has more drag and when open it has less, so there's a bigger differential - meaning the following car will have a higher closing and overtaking speed.

I hate the DRS. It creates artificial overtaking and that means most of the drivers will just wait for the straights instead of having to find a solution to passing a car in front of them.

As Pat Symonds said in his column for F1 Racing, after extensive research with Ross Brawn's new group of engineers - which Symonds heads up - the conclusion was: 'ground effect is the way to go'. I think most people that have spent any time working on aerodynamics would have said that a long time ago. Yes it needs to be done correctly, but that's just the same as any regulation.

For far too long, we've had kneejerk reactions to problems and they haven't been thought through well enough before implementation. Does anyone out there remember a simple rule instigated to reduce the risk of driver visor tear-offs getting into another car's radiator or brake ducts? How long did that one last?

How much do you think the new front wings will be developed during this season?
matt_20_001, via Instagram

I think the front wing assembly as we know it will reach its definitive design fairly quickly. There will be a process of optimising the wings to suit each car's individual aerodynamic characteristics, so they could be a little different from team to team as far as the chord length of each of the five permissible flaps are concerned.

Up to the start of this year the front wing package, including the endplates, was very powerful in how the airflow coming off its trailing edge affected the rest of the car. But these new regulations have dramatically reduced that influence.

That's no bad thing, because it means the smaller teams with less resource will not get left so far behind. These new rules will bring the teams closer together.

Also, by doing away with all the front wing turning vanes it means the aerodynamic steering characteristics will be a little easier to get to grips with. Good cars need stable aerodynamics from corner turn-in right through to the exit and one of the things that is changing is the front wheel steering angle. This can dramatically affect the airflow further downstream, but now the tyres are more open to the airflow those changes will be reduced.

The bargeboards will be the big area of development this year. They're now one of the most powerful components affecting downforce-producing devices on the rest of the car. How they manage the airflow has an influence on every other part of the car's aerodynamics.

You said in a video that the key to diffuser performance is connecting the edge to the rear wheel wake. However, if you look at the RANS equations, the stress due to turbulence term is negative. So the wake will act as a barrier to the flow exiting the diffuser - does this mean that connecting the diffuser is actually a bad idea?
f1tech_blog, via Instagram

I don't think connecting the very limited diffuser trailing edge area to the low-pressure behind the rear tyres is a bad idea, and I believe that can be confirmed by the diffuser development direction all the teams have taken.

The airflow is pulled under the flat floor area by the expanding diffuser profile at the rear of the car. The regulations restrict the area of that diffuser, so connecting it to the low-pressure area created by the rear tyres increases its exit area.

Designing a competitive F1 car would be very simple if it was about applying what it says in the textbooks, but I'm afraid it's not. That's why the teams have invested heavily in their own windtunnels, plus millions on CFD.

It's all about getting the best from a set of very restrictive regulations and that needs to be done through experimentation. To achieve that you sometimes have to think outside the box.

When choosing a design philosophy, how do teams know how much more 'development potential' the car has? Isn't that a bit of an unknown unknown?
prakagram, via Instagram

Yes, it's a bit of an unknown until you actually find the correct direction. All you can do is give yourself the most open opportunity.

Take the sidepods, for example. Having the leading edge as far away from the front-wheel wake as possible gives you the largest window for airflow management using the bargeboards and sidepod turning vanes. It might be that when you test it you actually lose downforce, but that's because what you have as a bargeboard isn't optimising the airflow in its new environment.

You need the vision and belief in what you're trying to achieve, and the commitment and time to achieve it. The reason you see developments arriving quickly - as Mercedes demonstrated just after its new car had been released and ran for the first time - is that the team hasn't had time to get all the downforce-developing components working together before the car had to hit the ground.

Developing the car is a constant process. You start with a change at the front and then optimise everything going rearwards. Then you start at the front again and repeat that process.

Teams that look at other cars up and down the pitlane and just copy another team's development direction usually get themselves lost. Yes, it's important to take note of the direction everyone else is going in, but to take the design of, let's say, a bargeboard from a Racing Point and put it on an Alfa Romeo means it would initially lose performance. Over time you might just claw that back, but that lost time means you're going backwards.

How expensive and complicated would it be for a team to make its car circuit specific?
Martin Catlin, via Twitter

The set-up of every car is optimised around the circuit it's going to race at. That involves downforce levels, vertical and roll stiffness, cambers and toes, damping levels, and where the third spring starts to affect the car's minimum ride height.

On the engine, harvesting and deployment is also optimised to make the best use of the extra power available, and the power delivery between a low-grip circuit and a high-grip circuit will also be tempered.

Every circuit has a set of requirements and most of them will merge into each other. Yes, if the season was all based on circuits like Monza then the cars would be built around a much more efficient base package; if they were all like Monaco then the opposite would apply because drag isn't so important there. Circuits with long corners like Barcelona require a grippier front end than circuits with short, sharp 90-degree corners.

The cars are basically designed around a medium-requirement circuit and then downforce is added or taken away as the circuit requires.

One other more important thing is the cooling, because these engines are built to run at fairly high temperatures. The cooling window is quite small - let's say 5C or -5C - then getting the cooling required for circuits with high ambient temperatures and a slow average speed isn't easy.

But the reverse - getting the car to run hot enough at low ambient temperatures and high average speed - is also difficult. That's why we often see revised cooling ducts and sidepods, especially if a team has made a critical error with the initial design meaning that the cooling isn't quite adequate even for a chilly day at Silverstone.

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