New Williams has "no fundamental concept changes"
Williams has decided against any "fundamental concept changes" with its new FW43 Formula 1 car, despite the difficulties it faced last season.
The Grove-based outfit is hopeful that its new 2020 car, which was revealed on Monday morning, will help it bounce back from a difficult 2019 campaign where it finished last in the constructors’ championship.
But although the FW42 picked up just a single point across 21 races, the outfit says that it has decided not to create a completely different car this season so that it can instead focus more on the areas of the car where there are big performance steps to be found.
Doug McKiernan, Williams’ design director, said: “We have paid significant attention to understanding the problem areas of the FW42 and we have carefully chosen parts of the car to develop, those that would give us the most performance for the resources we have.
“The main concept behind the FW43 is that it is a continuous development of the FW42, with no fundamental concept changes to the layout. The most important indicator that we are on the right path will be the level of correlation we have between the tool kit we use to design the car and what the track data is telling us.
“There has been a healthy development rate in the wind tunnel, and we have found reasonable improvements in the cooling efficiency. The team has addressed the mechanical issues that affected it in 2019, these include the brakes and the overall weight of the car. We have made some good progress across these areas and will continue to focus on them during the season.”
Adam Carter, who was made chief engineer following the arrivals of David Worner from Red Bull and Jonathan Carter from Renault, was clear that allowing the team to focus on areas where big gains can be made was the right approach.
“The decision to retain some of the core architecture of the FW42 means there has been less resource invested in developing new concepts, which in turn has rewarded the design team with greater bandwidth to optimise their work, evident in both packaging and component detail,” he explained.
“By preserving some key parameters, it has allowed for an uninterrupted development programme within aerodynamics in order to maximise the efficiency of the resources.
“As we head towards the pre-season tests and then onto the race season, the most important measure will be the progress relative to our peers, along with our intention of continuing our recent record of reliability.”
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