Force India VJM04 revealed

The new Force India has been overseen by Andy Green

The new Force India VJM04 is being revealed this afternoon on the team’s website.

The car is the first from the team to overseen by technical director Andrew Green, who 20 years ago was Gary Anderson’s right hand man on the Jordan 191, and has since enjoyed spells at BAR and RBR. He rejoined the team last year, initially as engineering director.

As before the car has a McLaren gearbox. The team has changed its aero philosophy over the winter in an attempt to address issues it had last year – including poor performance on high downforce tracks relative to high speed venues.

Among the novelties are a blade style rollhoop arrangement, similar to that used by Lotus. The extreme version tried by Mercedes last year has been outlawed.

“Everything is different, but visually a lot of it is subtle,” says Green. “The most obvious visual change is that we’ve gone away from a conventional roll-hoop to a blade. This gives us a small packaging improvement compared to a more conventional style. The engine cover is different, in-line with the abolition of the F-duct system. But there are a lot of differences under the skin that people won’t necessarily notice.

“We’ve recovered a lot of the aerodynamic performance, we believe. We still have a little bit to go, but we are still in the process of the realignment after the end of last season, because it does take a long time to move aerodynamically from one position to another. The movable wing is a whole new game, and we’ll be trying to exploit its performance to the max.

“We’ve also put in a lot of work trying to maximise the potential performance of the new Pirelli tyre compounds. To this end we’ve recruited a new senior tyre engineer, Jun Matsusaki, to guide us through the development process. The test we recently conducted in Valencia was a good learning exercise.

“Exhaust management will also be a big area of development this year.  There will be an upgrade for the first race, so there are some changes that will come into effect at the Bahrain test. Further down the line there are some big updates for the front of the car coming in for the first European race.”

Green says that the team has also gone back to basics by taking a close look at the fundamentals of last year’s package.

“Towards the end of last season there was a drop-off in our relative performance,’ says Green. ‘In theory we were adding performance to the car, but it wasn’t getting translated to the track. We decided to have a very close look at what was happening on the car, and what could be causing this. The bottom line is we didn’t extract the most from the blown diffuser, thus over the winter we’ve taken a reasonable philosophy chance on the aerodynamics of the car in order to try and prevent the sort of drop-off in performance that we saw at the end of last year.

“Looking back over the years the cars we have produced here have always struggled at the high downforce tracks – they always been ‘slippery’ cars. We’ve identified a problem, and now we have to fix it, and it means that potentially there’s another strategic aero change coming as well.”

The 2009 car was designed to utilise the Mercedes system and the team ran it in testing, although it was never raced.

“The Mercedes KERS system looks very strong, and we’re really happy with it. We’ve done a lot of running in the simulator, so the drivers are well up to speed with how to use it. We’re well developed with what we have to do for harvesting and deployment. It’s smaller and lighter than in 2009, and packaging required very few vehicle compromises.

“There are some big developments in the pipeline, probably bigger than this team has seen for quite a while. I think we’re looking for a much stronger finish to the season, and we do recognise the fact that there’s an Indian GP on the calendar, and we are an Indian team. The plan is to be putting stronger performance on the car through the year that will lift us up the ranks.”