F-C

Comments from Andrew Green, FI's technical director.

“It’s a brand new car from the ground-up – everything is new, including the chassis,” Green said. “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 focused a lot on the tires last year, we’ve given ourselves quite a few more options on setup 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 armory.

“The suspension has been tuned for what we learned on the tires, so the configuration is different to last year, as there are some reasonable changes to complement the tires. 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.”