Feature: Building the dream.

Building a new car - it's what Formula 1 is all about. Other than the 18 or so grands prix a year, no event is more exciting for aficionados of the sport than a new car launch. These flashy champagne-and-dips sponsors-and-media affairs tend to take place in January/February time as preparations for the new season start to gather pace. However, any new car's basic design will have been finalised months before the launch, as early as August the previous year, and the actual design process will have started months before that.

When I were a lad...

There was a time when a Formula 1 team would design a car over the winter, race it in the summer and then build another one the following winter.

"These days," says Gary Savage, Lucky Strike BAR Honda's deputy technical director, "you're at it non-stop. You're looking at the design for the next car before you've even raced the current one."

On top of that, while the team looks to the design of the next car, they've still got to apply a huge amount of resources to developing the current one. All in all, it means F1 car designers never get any rest.

The same goes for engine designers. The first meeting between BAR and Honda about the 2005 F1 engine took place before the 2004 Australian Grand Prix - before the 2004 engine had even been raced.

Remember, remember the 15th of September

The rolling design/development cycle in modern Formula 1 makes it very difficult to say when an old car stops and a new one begins, but Gary Savage has his own personal date for the beginning of the new car build.

"September 15, my wedding anniversary. It's an arbitrary date as far as F1 is concerned, but roughly speaking it's the time when I know I need to start concentrating on the new car. A lot of the car will be sorted by then and be well into production, such as suspension geometry and the gearbox - we'll have probably made the first gearbox shell and it'll be under machining and bonding by then - but there will also be lots still to sort out."

The long overlap between a new car's design programme and a current car's development creates a need for great depth of resources in a team and real wisdom as to how those resources are deployed. Throw too much weight behind next year's car too early and you'll fall behind with the current car as teams around you develop throughout the season. Concentrate too much on development this year and you'll be caught on the hop when it comes to next season.

Interim-hybrid-prototype-concept-cars

In recent years Ferrari have shown evolution, rather than revolution, to be the best policy when it comes to finding and maintaining a competitive car design. A team must first develop a sound base from which to work, ironing out any unreliability and weaknesses inherent in the design, and then seeking to push that base to optimise performance in every area from one year to the next.

One of the best ways of managing the transition from one car to the next is with an interim car - part old, part new - which is used to test certain components or ideas without having to commit to a whole new chassis design for preliminary winter testing.

Not all teams build interim cars, but even those that do don't always call them interim cars. Some are called 'hybrids'. BAR officially call theirs a concept car. But they all amount to the same thing.

The 067

Inside the factory at Brackley, this year's BAR interim has been given the designation 067. To the outside world it will be called the new BAR concept car, of course, but in design meetings Gary and everyone else on the technical side of the team need to know exactly which concept car they're talking about.

The same goes for every car the team produce. This year's BAR, the 006, is known internally as 060, the final digit being used to show specific designations for slightly different developmental steps. The 062, for example, was a variant in rear-suspension used for certain circuits.

The 067 will essentially consist of the front end of the 006 with the rear end of what will eventually be the 007. More specifically, it will have the new engine (with corresponding new engine mounts incorporated into the tub), new gear box, new rear suspension, new water system, new hydraulics system, new oil tank, new radiators and modified bodywork to cope with the changes in rear-end layout. The team will also add some modifications to create drag and downforce levels on a par with what we expect under the 2005 regulations.

Oily regs

The FIA have yet to finalise the exact details of the 2005 regulations, but one way or another it is likely that they'll move to cut Formula 1 lap times by around three seconds from this year, on the grounds of safety. However, contrary to reports in the specialist motorsport press, this does not mean that teams are having to hold back with designing their 2005 cars until the FIA get their act together.

"We pretty much know where we are with the regs. The areas the FIA are targeting from the chassis point of view are aerodynamics and tyres and neither of those will affect the early stages of the build to a great extent. The minimum dimensions of the chassis won't change. It's things like diffusers and bodywork flick ups that will be affected, but these are things that come later in the programme anyway."

A more pressing concern is how to make the chassis pass the new FIA side impact tests, which are more stringent for 2005 than ever before.

There's always something

While the interim car is being built and tested, work will continue on the design of the new car. Data from the 067 will provide insight and suggest developmental direction concerning any new components. This will be fed back into the design process and accommodated where possible.

But it isn't simply a case of checking the performance of a few new bits. An F1 car is made up of around 3600 drawn components. Approximately 75 per cent of these are revised at some point or another during the season and, although a new car is in truth a development of the old one, fewer than five per cent are carried over from one year to the next.

"The car is constantly changing," reiterates Gary, "and there's always something you can do to improve it."

To a casual observer, though, it is often hard to see what that "something" might be. Take rear end layouts for example - a hot topic in F1 circles in recent years. The trend has been for tighter and tighter suspension/gearbox/bodywork configurations. In 2002 Ferrari's F2002 looked like being the last word in rear ends. However, since then most teams have managed to package the rear even tighter, and will next year no doubt go even tighter still.

"This is why Formula 1 designers are such a sad bunch," muses Gary, "because they're always looking at what they've just done and thinking they could have done a better job. If you release a design and then three weeks later you aren't looking at it and thinking it's a complete dog, and you could have done much better given the time, then you're probably in the wrong job. That's the way most designers in Formula 1 think anyway."

When BAR first built their 2003 car, the 005, Gary says the whole design team stood around proudly congratulating themselves on their fine work.

"Within a couple of weeks we were thinking 'Oh, that could have been a bit better and I don't like that. Maybe we could have done this.' What seemed like a very tight bodywork at the time had shrunk even more mid-season and then shrunk again for the 006."

Raising the BAR - the 005

Despite the faults, the 005 was a very important car for BAR. It was the first time the team felt they had built a 'proper' racing car, incorporating cutting edge F1 technology for the first time throughout. Where the 005 let itself down, however, was reliability. On the chassis side, the team recorded just 57 per cent reliability in 2003. This was a major area of improvement for the 006, the team going to great lengths to instigate a system of finding, reporting and solving reliability problems before they manifested themselves on the track. The strategy has clearly paid dividends, 2004 chassis reliability shooting up to 97 per cent.

"Not bad," Gary reckons. "100 per cent would have been nicer."

Pace making

With reliability under control, the driving force for the design and development of the 007 will be pure performance. However, in the never-ending quest to go faster, the ergonomics of the car from an operational perspective cannot be neglected. No matter how nifty in theory, any CAD model still has to be driven and engineered in real life.

Driver feedback is essential, both from the previous year's car and the interim. If the driver is uncomfortable in the car or isn't happy with the way it operates he's not going to get the best performance out of it. Similarly, if the mechanics enjoy working on the car they're going to be more motivated during a grand prix weekend, so chief mechanics are also consulted about the pragmatics of the car's deign.

"If we can accommodate driver- or mechanic-led improvements into the design of the car we will do," says Gary. "Or, at the very least, if something is very awkward to work on at least the designers have explained first hand to the mechanics who will operate it, why a certain component has to be a certain way and what the gain in performance is. It's very important to keep the communication open so that the mechanics don't think 'Why the heck have they done that?' and so on."

And this isn't just to keep the mechanics happy for happiness sake. Among the top teams there isn't ever a great raw performance differential, so that extra competitive edge in a race could come from, for example, how quick the mechanics can change a nose, says Gary.

"I was timing our nose change compared to the McLaren one at Spa and we were about 30 per cent quicker than them. It turned out we had to do one in the race so that gives us an advantage potentially against other teams."

Having said that, the pragmatics of operating the car never get in the way of the real goal: more speed.

Unlike road car design, in F1 performance is everything.

Testing, testing

With feedback assimilated from every department and the final car design frozen, the sooner the new chassis can get on track to start testing the better. Much easier said then done, says Gary:

"The difficult thing is balancing the design process with the pragmatics of getting the car built. You can never give the guys who are designing the car as much time as you'd like because you need to be able to physically produce the parts. Plus you need to have a surplus of components before you can go testing. You end up asking the designers to work to a timetable - and you can't invent to a timetable."

The 007 is right on schedule so we'll no doubt see it tearing around a track somewhere in testing before long. Much is made in the press about testing times in the run-up to every new season. In truth, however, there's very little can be gleaned about the teams' relative performance from pre-season testing. The wraps may come off the new season's cars at their various launches, but it isn't till March and the Australian Grand Prix that the gloves come off. By which time, of course, work on next season's cars will already be well under way.

Feature courtesy of the BAR-Honda Lucky Tribe media site.