Q&A with Nick Chester (Lotus) before Suzuka

Technical Director Nick Chester looks at the challenges of Suzuka as well as further afield.

Suzuka is a very distinct circuit – what are the challenges?

The challenges are the high speed corners. You can’t run maximum downforce in Suzuka - as you will end up a little too slow on the straights - so you need to give the driver sufficient downforce to give confidence in the fast twisty bits whilst not clipping their wings down the straights. This is part of the reason why Suzuka is such a driver favourite, as drivers can be absolutely on the limit without the car totally stuck to the ground through maximum downforce. It’s not just having sufficient downforce, it’s ensuring that this is delivered in a balanced nature. Getting the suspension set-up spot on is essential here too. You need to extract all the grip that’s possible from the car.

What were the issues the team faced in Singapore?

Street courses can often be pretty particular in their demands and that’s something we saw in Singapore. We knew it wasn’t going to be one of the easiest races of the year for us, but we did have to really work hard to get to the best pace we could with the E23. We didn’t get the tyres into their working window at the right time early on in the weekend and we also had all the usual street course challenges. Romain – in particular – with his engineers were able to make some subtle and positive changes to get him into the top ten for qualifying which was rewarding for all.

How did the race itself play out?

Both drivers did terrific jobs out on track which is always very pleasing to see, even when you don’t get the ultimate result you want. With the pace of the car and the starting positions, we had to try quite aggressive strategies. This was particularly the case with Romain after he lost positions at the start meaning we brought forward his stops to undercut and gain track position. Unfortunately this meant we missed out on a quick pit stop under the virtual safety car at the first stop. We suffered worse tyre degradation than expected on Romain’s final stint which cost us in the last few laps. Pastor made up positions from his start but was compromised later on after the damage sustained from Jenson. It was certainly an interesting race and a challenging one on the pit wall.

Pastor continues with the team next year, what does this mean for preparations?

Pastor is a great person to work with and you always benefit from continuity. It’s true that for various reasons Pastor’s first two seasons with the team haven’t been the easiest, so we’re looking forward to working with him in what has potential to be a much more settled environment. We’ll certainly be looking to have a stronger season in every regard in 2016.

Do you expect Romain will be partnering him again next year?

We know Romain has made his decision and we will all know soon.

The Japanese GP is the second race of a back-to-back pairing; how does that affect preparations?

It does make for a busy week with the added challenge of the crew changing their body clocks to local time after fighting the urge to do that for the night schedule of Singapore. Fortunately, both locations are relatively straight-forward to work in so there aren’t additional challenges like you have in Monaco for instance. Our set-up crew is well versed at packing-up and building-up the garages and rest of the infrastructure we have, but certainly they have busy few days with the back-to-backs.