- McLaren
Teams gearing up for busiest winter yet
McLaren sporting director Sam Michael says Formula One teams are bracing themselves for their busiest winter for over 20 years as they rush to prepare their 2014 cars for the first pre-season test at the end of January.
New engine and aero regulations for next season will see an overhaul in car design plus new challenges in terms of reliability and performance. The 2013 season ends this weekend in Brazil but teams will have just two months to produce a fully-running 2014 car for the first test in Jerez.
"There is not much winter, to be honest," Michael said. "There's about 60 days before we start setting up for the first test. There's a huge amount of work to do, both on the aero reg change by itself, plus all the powertrain work. Mercedes are flat out making sure the engine has got enough power and is reliable enough, so it's going to be the busiest winter I've known in the sport - it's certainly the biggest rule change. I'm not complaining, it's a lot of work but it's interesting when you get big changes, from an engineering perspective it's when you learn the most."
The new turbo V6 engines will see a complete overhaul in technology, not least from the complex heat and kinetic energy recovery systems, which are far more integrated with the engine than the current KERS unit. Michael said the amount of reliability issues per race would increase but teams would be able to problem shoot over the course of the weekend a lot more than they did in the 1980s turbo era.
"The only thing to combat that is that in days gone by you didn't have the intelligence and knowledge when something was going to go wrong," he added. "With all the data systems and telemetry that we have, you'll see performance drop rather than reliability. Whereas 20 years ago, before my time, you had a lot problems because things weren't electronically controlled - gearboxes for example, we didn't have rev limiters on engines.
"All those sorts of things have gone and the telemetry will also tell you things like changes in oil pressure and the gradual decay of an engine through doing samples of oil through a weekend. That's all improved massively. I think you'll still have issues but I'm not sure it will reflect in total DNFs. Instead, people will back off and wind things down to finish because there is no point in it blowing up."
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