What a difference a winter makes!

The 2009 Formula 1 season started on the last weekend in March with a terrific race in Melbourne which stood the form-book on its head. At AT&T Williams we set the fastest lap of the race, an enormous improvement from our form towards the end of 2008. Brawn GP, who finished last season in ninth place as Honda Racing, won the race. Congratulations to them for this achievement.

So how has this change come about? The answer lies in a significant shift in the regulations that govern the design of the cars. We have known since the end of 2007 that the cars for the 2009 season would have aerodynamics very different to those of 2008. Race car aerodynamics are the biggest contributor to their relative performance and are developed using thousands of experiments in large wind tunnels and very complex simulations run on high performance computers. We develop a new aerodynamic package for the start of every season and then we develop this aggressively throughout the season, each trying to out-do the other and gain those few precious tenths of a second per lap that make the difference between winner and also-ran.

Each team has a certain amount of wind tunnel and computing capacity at its disposal and so we each had to decide how much of this to dedicate to designing updates to our 2008 cars and how much to focus on the 2009 regulations. At AT&T Williams, we knew from relatively early on that we were not going to win a Championship in 2008 and so we started to allocate people and resources to the 2009 project earlier than many other teams. It appears that Honda Racing (now Brawn GP) may have taken this decision even before we did. The result is that we have both come out of the starting blocks for 2009 competitive and looking forward to a much stronger showing this year.

The new rules about our aerodynamics have also sparked controversy in the sport – much of the aerodynamic performance of the cars comes from the diffuser, which is the part low down at the back of the car. We came up with an interpretation of the new 2009 diffuser rules that allowed us to generate more performance from this area than we first thought possible and a number of other teams (who had missed this possibility) made a formal protest against our car at the first race. The Stewards met and decided that our car is compliant with the new rules and so we did not need to make any changes. However, the teams that protested are not satisfied and are taking the matter to the International Court of Appeal, which will meet in a couple of weeks and make a final ruling on the matter. In the meantime I’m sure other teams will be busy in their wind tunnels coming up with their own version of our novel diffuser design.

I write this on the eve of the Malaysian Grand Prix, the second of the season, which is held at a demanding track. It will be a further test of the progress we have made and once again we are completely reliant on AT&T to make sure that we can deploy all of our resources to get the most out of the car – this is our third season using the AT&T MPLS network for all of our communications from whatever track we are at to our base in the UK. The early races in the season are often a test of reliability as well as performance and we have always sent additional engineers to the first few events of each year just so they can be in the garage if we have a problem. That is until now. For the first time in as long as anyone can remember we have left our Head of Design for the transmission at home and gone racing without him. This is not because we have new faith in our transmission; it is because we have new faith in our network and our ability to get every piece of data generated at the track back to the UK in next to no time, so that if we do have a problem in the field, the relevant engineer can access the data and make an informed decision even though he is thousands of miles away. So instead of 50 hours on an aeroplane, he can spend his time designing an even better transmission for 2010…

Alex Burns

3 April 2009