Q&A with Nick Chester (Lotus)

Technical Director Nick Chester dissects the team’s Canadian race weekend and looks ahead to Romain and Pastor pushing for more points at Spielberg.

What’s the potential for Lotus F1 Team in Austria?

There’s nothing to say we can’t perform as we did in Montréal. It’s another medium downforce track with demands for strong traction, efficient aerodynamics and power unit performance. There are a few more medium speed corners than in Canada which changes the requirements a bit and there’s every reason to expect the E23 will go pretty well.

Last year was the first time back to the circuit after a rather long interlude; what did we learn?

It had been a long time since we’d visited the circuit and there was a lot to learn in terms of set-up and our approach to a Grand Prix weekend. Particular lessons learnt included that we underestimated the braking requirements and we found it difficult to get the tyres into their optimal temperature operating window. In both regards we’re far better placed with the E23.

What was your assessment of the Canadian Grand Prix weekend?

It was a strong weekend, but not a perfect one. As regards the E23 Hybrid, we were pleased with braking performance in terms of getting a fast lap, traction was better than expected and overall car balance was good – the drivers could drive the car with confidence and consistency. In the race itself, we lost out on the first stint, but once we were on the soft tyres both cars were setting lap times comparable with the cars in front; if we’d been able to perform better in the initial stage of the race we’d have been in with a shout of stronger results. This is something we’re looking at for future races.

There’s been something of a trend for the team to do generally better in the race than in qualifying, yet that seemed to be reversed in Canada?

There’s some truth in that and we’re spending a lot of time analysing our tyre temperatures to see what lessons can be learnt. Generally our drivers report an understeery car in qualifying but a more balanced car in the race, whereas this time the feedback was more of a well-balanced car in qualifying but some oversteer in the race. It’s our task to try to get the optimum for both scenarios. Certainly from the Barcelona test onwards we have made a step forward in understanding and optimising the car. In Monaco we were able to harness the low-speed corner potential and we saw some of this in Montréal where we had a particularly good balance. It’s proving to be quite an easy car to set-up and we’re continually making improvements.

Is there anything scary on the horizon from the races ahead?

There doesn’t seem to be anything to strike fear into the team, in fact the next races present us with a good opportunity to move up the order. Austria should be strong, Silverstone should be good as it’s also a power circuit if a little more of a challenge with some of the high speed corners and we went quite well in Barcelona with quite a similar set-up. Budapest should be quite fine as we’ve shown that we can deal with low speed corners well and traction has been promising. Spa and Monza should also be strong with their power demands. We’re showing well on all types of track so we’ve good confidence for the season ahead.

We’ve moved into fifth in the Constructors’ Championship; what are the targets?

Certainly we want to maintain this position and target any improvement we can get. There’s a reasonable gap ahead to fourth, but certainly there’s a feeling that we have come on a long way in terms of reliability and understanding of our car after what was a big change for us in terms of Power Unit supplier for this season. We know that Red Bull in fourth position have tremendous resources at their disposal, but we’ll be doing everything we can to catch them.

This weekend is the Le Mans 24 Hours race, if the regulations allowed a Formula 1 car to compete how would it fare?

It would be a lot of fun and I’d love the challenge of engineering an F1 car for a 24 hour race. The current engine regulations mean we have an engine and gearbox which could cover the race distance and that certainly wasn’t the case in the past. The current F1 car could go in an endurance race such is the performance life of so many of the parts these days. In the past with the V8s and older gearboxes, you wouldn’t have the durability. Maybe it’s something we should talk to the ACO about…