James Key : We have been through an incredibly busy 3 months

We have been through an incredibly busy 3 months, our directions for the STR 11 were well established in August last year but when the engine change decision was made we had to put a large part of the project effectively on hold. This did not stop us developing, but did increasingly constrain the flexibility we had to design-in what was at that stage an unknown Power Unit. When the agreement was finally given the go ahead in late October last year and we were able to discuss details with our partners at Ferrari it was clear that the task ahead was significant, we made life more difficult for ourselves too by specifically setting out a plan to fit the new Power Unit into the existing packaging space we had to minimise any installation performance deficit on the rest of the car as best we could.

Power units form a very large part of current cars architecture as implications go well beyond the space between the chassis and gearbox. There are also the other critical systems – cooling circuits, electrical installation, gearbox internals design, exhaust systems and specification etc which all need to be covered and redesigned, and all of this affects everything from the cockpit to the rear suspension. I think the team has done an outstanding job to get the car complete in time for the first test, it has been a hard push to achieve this but we made it. We have some excellent people at STR and I think it shows what we can do by catching up and hitting the first test in just a few months.

The 2015 Ferrari power unit is already well-established and a really good step forward from their 2014 PU. It should be a good performance step for us and brings us closer to most other teams compared to last year. We look forward to good reliability too given that it has run an entire season already.

Clearly, it will be very important to work on chassis development in the strongest way possible. We will be the only team with a year old spec power unit and it will not be further developed from what we have now, all other teams will have PU development so we will need to compensate as best as possible with chassis development.

When it comes to this year’s chassis, we wanted to concentrate on improving the low-speed cornering capability of the car. Last year’s car was a big step forward and particularly good in medium and high speed corners, but we have felt our lower speed performance was not as competitive as we would like. That has been one area which has led to a change in approach for our 2016 car. In other aspects we have an evolution of strong areas of development from 2015, or a completely new direction where better ideas have formed or we need to address other known weaknesses.

All of our recent work on STR11 has been done with the benefits of our new state of the art facilities in Faenza. It’s a great motivation to see this amount of investment going into the team, it’s a really positive sign for everyone and gives us all a lot of confidence. We’ve been able to sit most of the technical group that’s based in Faenza in the same office, which helps communications and visibility of what’s going on. So we’ve got CFD people, the vehicle performance group, Design groups and others, all sitting in the same office. New R&D facilities and manufacturing capabilities have been built in too, making the team significantly more efficient than before. The IT infrastructure has also been improved, we have many meeting rooms now with video conference facilities which allow quick and easy communications with our technical office at Bicester in the UK. This has further improved communications which is essential over two sites in two different countries. Finally Bicester has also been through a similar process with a complete new office and manufacturing facility to support our wind tunnel and aerodynamics department. This all helps the team work to a better level and push our ideas and developments that little bit further.

Taking everything into consideration, the target for 2016 will be the same as last year. It will not be easy, but we know that we had the chassis and drivers to achieve that in 2015 but too many problems stood in our way, so we will try again in 2016.