Willis wants testing return

Posted by Mikel on June 30th, 2010 at 11:55pm

HRT technical director Geoff Willis would like to see the return of in-season testing – albeit on a limited basis.

Willis said:

From a purely engineering point of view, if we don’t have testing we have to compensate with rig testing and analysis. The money you don’t spend on testing you spend on that.

The mistake, for me, is that while it was sensible to stop unrestricted testing, a better balance would have been to have certain fixed testing times common to all teams and wrap up a commercial operation around it. You have to remember that there are often fairly large gaps when there is no F1 in Europe and we could have one test in Spain, one in Italy, one in the UK, something like that.

The downside is that to do that, unless the calendar was particularly sympathetic, would mean going back to requiring an additional test team.

Unless you can synchronise the calendar and actually use your race team to do the tests, but that might be difficult and would probably take a couple of years to work out. It’s something for FOTA to talk about but from an engineering point of view it would be nice to have some testing during the season.
Geoff Willis

With limited resources and no in-season testing HRT are, like Virgin, relying on Computational Fluid Dynamics for their development work:

In the short term we will be using hired wind tunnel time and will be doing a balanced programme of wind tunnel and CFD. For in-season development right now, with the time pressures it’s almost certainly going to be a 100% CFD programme, which has its slight risks, but I think from where we are, is sensible.
Geoff Willis

The team have suffered a series of gearbox-related problems on the F110 but Willis says they will have to continue using a customer gearbox as they are not ready to build their own:

Most of our problems have been related to transmission hydraulics, which is a complicated part of the car. It is the first time that Xtrac has been involved as a supplier of the whole system. It’s tough considering that we don’t have testing and we therefore have to try and find fixes on the dyno.

We’re looking at various options for next year. I think the one thing that is pretty certain is that the team will not be designing its own gearbox next year, so we’re either going to be a customer of Xtrac or a customer of somebody else. We don’t have the resource to do an in-house design.
Geoff Willis

However he believes the team have made good progress since the start of the season, having not been able to do any pre-season testing:

I think to date we have generally kept level with the other start-up teams which are developing the cars. I think the drivers have found their way around the car pretty well and from race two or three we have been more or less fixed on set-up and are getting slicker at operating the car and getting the best out of the race weekend.

You can clearly see we have been maintaining pace and if anything compared to the leading cars, closing up. We were 6.5% off the pace and now we are typically 4.8-5% off with qualifying time. The car is fundamentally the same, so I think that has come from the drivers. Both of them have worked well with the team and have a good working relationship.
Geoff Willis

The 107% rule set to return next year but despite HRT languishing at the back of the grid Willis says he’d be happier with a lower target:

I think at one race it would have been an issue. But from an F1 engineering point of view the limit should actually be closer than that, more like a 5% rather than a 7% rule. I think you have to expect the teams to operate at a certain level, that’s what we want from Formula 1.

Obviously we would be a little bit uncomfortable with 105% in our current position but it wouldn’t surprise me in the future. It’s just the nature of Formula 1. Go back 20 years and it was much more scattered.
Geoff Willis

Read more: Double finish at home (HRT race review)

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