Williams 2019 front wing test, Hungaroring, 2018

New front wings will do more for F1 than higher fuel limit- Lowe

2019 F1 season

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Williams chief technical officer Paddy Lowe has defended the changes being made to Formula 1’s front wings for next season, saying they will improve the racing.

New regulations for the 2019 F1 season will force teams to use simpler designs and increase the front wing widths to two metres. However some team principals have expressed doubts whether this will achieve the goal of improving the racing.

Another change for next year will see the maximum fuel limit rise from 105kg to 110kg. But Lowe believes this will have far less of an effect than the front wing changes.

“It seems to be popular to say the aerodynamic changes that we’re making won’t make any difference,” said Lowe. “But I can tell you for sure it’ll make a lot more difference than the fuel limit.”

Lowe was dismissive of the increased fuel allocation for next season. “I don’t believe it’s going to make any difference to anything,” he said. “That’s my opinion.

“You put in fuel that makes sense for your race. That’s always been done and it always involves a bit of fuel saving. Cars are often doing what we call ‘lift and coast’. They do it for tyres more than fuel as well. There might be the odd race where it makes a little bit of difference.”

However Lowe admitted teams are trying to recreate the ‘outwash effect’ which the 2019 front wing rules are aimed at eradicating. “Everybody is, of course,” he said. “You can’t un-invent knowledge.

“But it’s not easy. I’d be amazed if people can recover it to where it is today.”

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23 comments on “New front wings will do more for F1 than higher fuel limit- Lowe”

  1. To me this sounds terribly like ‘everyone figured out the new front Wings but Williams didn’t’.

    1. @mrboerns: Just sounds like that. What Lowe can’t say is… with this new aircraft carrier wing design, there’s enough space to embed thousands of nanotube fans to deliver fan car performance without skirting the rules.

  2. The joint cackhandedness of Lowe and Ms Williams are going to sink that team if they are not careful.

    1. You mean “has sunk that team”… from best of the rest to dead last…

      1. I thought that Ms. Williams did not get bought out -unlike Mr. López, Mr. Mallya, Mrs. Kalterborn or Mr. Sauber-, so perhaps her team is still above water.

        1. @faulty, it seems that Aldoid and Witan are also forgetting how poor Williams’s results were before their brief moment in the sun in 2014 and 2015.

          From 2008 to 2013, they had been 8th, 7th, 6th, 9th, 8th and 9th in succession, and their points totals in 2011 and 2013 were even lower than this year (just five points in 2011 and 2013 respectively). Their success in 2014 and 2015 was abnormally strong, as over the past few decades they’ve usually been nearer the back of the grid rather than the front.

          In fact, let’s be blunt – you can make a strong argument that their brief success in 2014 and 2015 wasn’t because of their own competence, but because others managed to underperform by an even greater degree. Ferrari went badly awry in 2014 and Red Bull in 2015, Lotus was on the verge of bankruptcy, with hundreds of staff fleeing the team as they feared for their jobs, Force India were really performing extremely well despite having a far more limited budget than Williams, Toro Rosso’s function, as ever, was simply to feed drivers to the parent team, Sauber produced a total disaster in the C33 that hobbled them for years afterwards and McLaren was both struggling to make the Honda partnership work and with their own internal power struggles.

          The moment that other teams have sorted out some of their own problems, Williams started rapidly sliding back to where they were before and, realistically, where they should be. Williams have been nothing but a faint shadow, even a caricature, of their former glory since the early 2000s – people always refer to that brief burst in 2014 and 2015, but really those two years were a brief moment of success compared to the string of poor results that they’d been putting together for years before that.

  3. What’s that picture? Why is there paint on the tyre?

    1. It’s called Flow-vis, it stays semi liquid and shows the direction the air flows over the bodywork.

    2. It’s proof that Banksy is actually an F1 mechanic.

      1. @grat

        Hahahahahahaha…best comment ever

  4. Note that he also sees the tyres as a bigger problem for actual racing than fuel limitations, and he has been around long enough to recognise the problems in F1 even though he hasn’t got the answer for Williams specific problems.

    1. Yep, that’s also my take @hohum (though I have some sympathy for the way @mrboerns and @jimmy-cynic interpret it, I just hope that isn’t the the full truth!)

  5. Even if the downforce levels and dirty air effects stay the same in 2019 despite the front wing change I’d still say it is net positive because without the changes we would just be getting more and more downforce, dirty air and sensitiveness to the dirty air in 2019. F1 has never had this much downforce. If you took half of the downforce away we would still have more than 2014 for example. We have more mechnacal grip from these big tires than ever before. And we have more downforce from ground effects than ever before.

  6. Has there been a season where you had to start with the full fuel capacity? If they weren’t given the option wouldn’t they want to burn off the fuel quickly to get rid of the weight and finish with just enough fuel as opposed to trying to start with the least amount of fuel and finish with just enough by coasting through the race?

    Would that make a difference or would it still be the same?

    1. They can not burn it off, there is a maximum fuel flow allowed

      1. IIRC they can burn 100kg per hour.

        1. If so they could easily burn it off in the hour and a half they usually race, maybe it would just lead to them burning it off as quickly as possible to get to the minimum required amount to finish the race

          1. Peak flow rate.

    2. @daytek, It depends, easy to overtake or not, long or short straights, tyre strategy etc, lots of options, would VER want to be fuel saving at Monza with a Ferrari or ForceX with fuel to burn in his mirrors ? Trouble is they mostly all start with the same computer generated tactical plan.

  7. These days it’s no longer just fuel saving, it’s PU saving as well because of the 3 PU rule so the amount of lift and coast is even higher than before.

    If you’re in front, the cars behind have trouble challenging because their tyres overheat, if you’re behind, why risk your PU when there’s little chance of an overtake.

    Lowe’s right that Aero will make more difference than more fuel – he just fails to mention that the changes aren’t really all that likely to make much difference because teams may have already overcome the effects of the rule change.

    At least we’re hoping that’s what he means or Williams are in for a tough time again in 2019.

  8. Basically F1 is dead, long live FE!

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