Force India unveiled its new VJM06 at a damp Silverstone today, with Paul Di Resta doing the honours on his own as there is still no decision on the second driver.
The car is the fourth to be launched in 2013, but the first to actually run.
Like its predecessor the car was designed by a team led by technical director Andrew Green.
“Obviously the regulations are reasonably stable from last year to this year, and the ban on the double DRS doesn’t really affect us, for example,” said Green.
“We basically stopped developing last year’s car around the middle of the season. In fact it was still being developed in the tunnel, but those parts were not being brought to the track. So the trackside guys had a chance to understand what they had, rather than it changing every week, which is really what happened up to that point.
“When you have something that is stable you can then refine it and really dial it in. We just tried to understand what the car was doing, where it differed from the model, and more importantly how we worked the tyres. We used that extra knowledge for this year’s car, and it helped quite a lot.”
Despite the continuity, Green says that much has changed compared with the VJM06.
“It’s a brand new car from the ground-up – everything is new, including the chassis. I know other teams were talking about carrying over big chunks of last year’s car, but we haven’t done that, to try and push ourselves up the grid. There were still some gains to be had with the chassis, so we elected to do that. However the car is evolution rather than revolution compared with last year, just due to the nature of the regulations.
“Visually probably the biggest thing that everybody’s going to notice this year is the fairing on top of the nose to get rid of the step. It’s completely neutral as far as the car is concerned, so it’s a small thing really. We were happy to do it as the car looks nicer!
“There are quite a few changes under the skin. Because we focussed a lot on the tyres last year we’ve given ourselves quite a few more options on set-up to help us manage them from qualifying to the race. So that’s something we’ll be looking at going into winter testing – we’ll be looking at those options and trying to understand them. It’s going to be difficult because in testing it’s so cold, but those options will give the engineers another weapon in their armoury.
“The suspension has been tuned for what we learned on the tyres, so the configuration is different to last year, as there are some reasonable changes to compliment the tyres. The rear suspension is quite a bit different – for aerodynamic reasons the whole thing has been lifted up to allow the airflow under the lower rear wishbones.”
Adam Cooper F1 