Coughlan sure Williams can build strong car

Technical Director Mike Coughlan is the man with overall responsibility for Williams F1’s 2012 car, and it’s not a position that is new to him, having designed race winners for McLaren in the past as well as being Technical Director for Arrows between 1999 and 2002.

He knows that at Grove, AT&T Williams has everything he needs in order to construct a competitive car.

“The facilities here are absolutely first-rate, and the only thing we haven’t done is utilised them correctly,” he said. “There has been a forensic look at what we’ve been doing wrong and where we need to improve, and we’ve come to the conclusion that some strategic errors were made in the past.

“We’ve identified the key elements we need to put in place, not just for next season but forever, to make a successful car every year. We need both performance and reliability as those factors in unison are what win you races and championships, and we feel that we’re now moving in the right direction.”

Many observers felt the FW33 suffered from an aerodynamic shortfall, and while Mike doesn’t disagree with that assessment, he also feels there were other contributory issues which, thanks to an extensive analysis process, he is confident will not be repeated going forward.

“I don’t think it’s just aerodynamic, I think we made some decisions where effectively we gambled on something which would have cost us performance from a vehicle dynamics point of view, but which would have been outweighed by the aerodynamic gain,” he said.

“That obviously didn’t pay off – had it done so we would have looked much better this season. You’ve also got to take into account that the blown floor became more and more prevalent. We spent a lot of development time in the wind tunnel looking at how much time a blown floor might have gained us, but ultimately we couldn’t blow the floor, so we could say in hindsight that time would have been better spent working on an un-blown floor. It’s a difficult one because you don’t know at the outset what the gains will be, and a lot of time is spent getting to the answer, at which point it might turn out not to have been worth the effort.”

Mike outlined his perspective of the new technical management’s responsibilities and his role as Technical Director, before outlining how the team is measuring the development success of the FW34.

“Jason Somerville has full responsibility for aerodynamic performance, and he reports to me. Mark has the same full responsibility for race operations, but I leave them to run their departments as they see fit,” he said. “I just like to ensure that they’re moving in the same direction which benefits the design strategy, so I see myself as directing their progress.

“In Jason’s case, he has a weekly target where he needs to show me that he’s found a certain number of points of downforce, and if it is missed then I look to find out how we can get that back on track,” he added. “The way we arrived at that was to look at what we need to do to get ourselves into the top ten next year.”

“We have to extrapolate the performance of other teams in relation to ours and come up with a decision about how much of the difference is aerodynamically generated, how much is down to the engine and so on. We make some assumptions about where they are and then by looking at our own performance relative to it, we come up with a target system that says how much additional downforce we need to find.

“We also have a new partner in Renault, and we have just come back from a week’s test at the Renault Sport F1 facility at Viry, where our new gearbox ran for the first time and covered three full race weekends at Spa,” Mike said of the team’s new engine supplier. “The advantages of the Renault powerplant are power, their ability to run at elevated water and oil temperatures and very low degradation in terms of power across the engine’s lifespan.”

Mike and his team have spent the last few months analysing the 2012 technical regulations in preparation for the design of next year’s car, and he revealed that a technical director’s biggest headache is making sure that there are no unseen loopholes that could create a performance advantage for the competition.

“Fundamentally the rules aren’t changing next year, but there are a couple of areas around the exhaust exit and nose height that have been modified. The exhaust part is an easy one – we will lose the performance from the floor but will be going back to a system that was popular a few years ago. You will still see some blown effects but those will be much reduced. In terms of the nose height, I think people should get prepared for some quite different looking chassis next year, where the chassis height is kept high with a reduced nose height. It will be interesting to see how people treat that problem.

“Whenever there is a rule change it is down to the interpretation of the teams as to who comes up with the best package,” added Mike. “Someone like me reads the rules and thinks ‘there can’t possibly be any loopholes in that’, but one of the big fears technical directors have is that there is and someone else finds it. We always wonder ‘have we missed something?’

“It’s too early to say what 2012’s big innovation might be but there is usually something that comes along. The double diffuser from 2009 was a very contentious ruling and some of the teams would absolutely argue that making it legal was unfair. I think teams will always find areas of the regulations to exploit, because there is a small team of people at the FIA who set the rules and hundreds of extremely bright people at the teams poring over them.”

He finished by outlining the current state of play with the production of next year’s car, and what will be happening to get the car prepared for pre-season testing in February.

“As we stand at the moment our gearbox and engine installation programme has finished and been tested on the dyno, and will run twice more before Christmas to have covered in excess of 6,000km. All of the rear suspension has been completed so we’ll also run that as well.

“The car is slated to be delivered to the race shop in mid-January and we’ll be ready to go to the first test in early February. The aim is that by the end of January, all the parts that can possibly have been verified have been, and the track testing is purely a verification of that work. There should be enough mileage on the major parts so that if the car stops on track with a fundamental problem, it comes as a surprise. Other than that the testing will focus on improving reliability and the overall aerodynamic performance of the car.”