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Mark Hughes has written an interesting piece on the ITV F1 website about the problems McLaren have been having with their new car.

McLaren won the 2008 Drivers’ Championship and were among the favourites going into the 2009 season after early testing.  But recently the Woking squad have been falling further and further behind the other teams and drivers Lewis Hamilton and Heikki Kovalainen have been lapping a couple of seconds off the pace.  After much speculation team boss Martin Whitmarsh confirmed McLaren weren’t sandbagging and those lap times were the best they could do.

But how could such a beautiful car be so slow?  And how could something with a nose like the Renault be faster?  It all comes down to the black art of aerodynamics.  While McLaren have banks of supercomputers running CFD analysis and a state of the art wind tunnel back in Woking, all it takes is one little disturbance in the airflow to effectively “switch off” a perfectly good aero part.

McLaren’s problems highlight the importance of aerodynamics in Formula One.  With no development allowed on engines, aerodynamics is where most of an F1 car’s speed can be won or lost.  Take the Brawn GP BGP 001; it has the same engine as the McLaren, but better aero and Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello have been putting in some scorching lap times.

The good news for McLaren fans, according to Hughes, is that once the McLaren engineers find the problem it should be pretty straightforward to fix.  The question is can they find the problem before they give away too many points?

In other aerodynamic developments, the Brawn GP diffuser’s legality has been called into question along with the Toyota and Williams.  According to Cologne newspaper Express, the BGP 001 design links the floor with the diffuser in a sneaky (and illegal) way to generate more downforce.  The FIA have already inspected the Toyota and Wiliams cars and found them, in their opinion, legal.  As Max Mosley says:

The current FIA view is that Williams and Toyota have been clever and found a loophole in the rules. It’s probably wrong, but they’ve exploited the wording of the rules in a clever way.

But because of the way these things work, the teams have to wait until Melbourne if they want to lodge an official protest.

And finally, Williams have decided to remove the cockpit-mounted ‘skate fins’ that appeared on their car in testing.  It seems like FIA technical delegate Charlie Whiting didn’t like the safety implications of two massive spikes on either side of the driver’s head and I can’t say I disagree.  They did look kind of cool though.

If you want to be a professional Formula One driver you need to manage your brand.  That means, at the very least, you need a website.  Here you (or your manager, or you team of publicists) can post pictures and news about your racing career.  You can also use it flog merchandise.

You probably also want to get yourself a fan club, a Facebook page, twitter account and a karting or GP2 team.

But all that is pretty standard stuff.  It doesn’t really set you apart from every other racing car driver on the planet.  If you really want to prove how good you are you need your very own museum.  Like David Coulthard.

Is there an Alonso Museum?  No.  A Hamilton Museum?  No.  There isn’t even a Senna Museum.  (Ok so there is a Juan Manuel Fangio Museum and a Gilles Villenueve Musem but the ratio of racing drivers to museums is still pretty low.)  But DC has one.  Or at least he did.  According to the DCM website:

For the last few years DC fan Wendy McKenzie has been running the David Coulthard Museum.  After it had been closed down she took it upon herself to get the museum up and running again, so like herself, DC fans the world over would be able to see for themselves the amazing collection of memorabilia he has amassed and celebrate the motorsport career of one of Scotland’s most succesful drivers

That time has unfortunately come to an end and you somehow get the feeling that the small village of Twynholm and Scotland as a whole are losing a National treasure that has drawn in loyal David Coulthard fans from all over the world during the past 12 years. Wendy had this to say…

It is with a very heavy heart that I have to announce the closure of the David Coulthard Museum.

I have found the circumstances just a little too much to take, and as you are all probably aware I have struggled all the way through this but as we all know it is the little thing that finally breaks the camels back and after a lot of heart-searching I have come to the decision to move on with my life and get it into some kind of normal routine again.

Yikes!  Sounds like it was a labour of love keeping that national treasure going.  It’s a pity it has closed down as it looks like it had some interesting stuff in it including the Williams FW17B that DC won his first race in. But I guess the number of loyal David Coulthard fans visiting Twynholm from all over the world has dropped now that DC has retired.

As Wendy says:

Short of a miracle, it will not be opening to the general public again.

Wow.

Only days after the new Brawn GP car’s first shakedown at Silverstone, Rubens Barrichello set the fastest time on the final day of testing in Barcelona on Thursday.

His lap time of 1:18.926 was nearly a second faster than Nico Rosberg’s Williams FW31 and Lewis Hamilton was almost two seconds slower in his MP4-24 despite being powered by the same Mercedes-Benz engine.  The other Mercedes powered car, Fisichella’s Force India VJM02, finished in tenth place.

Not only was the BGP 001 fast it was reliable too, completing 110 laps.

I said last week that I thought Brawn GP could do alright this year but I didn’t really expect it to look so strong so soon.

Team owner Ross Brawn said:

The team made a very late start to our pre-season testing programme, with only seven days in which to run the car before the first race in Melbourne; therefore our focus has been on reliability and achieving as much mileage as possible. Both of these aims have been successfully achieved this week.

There has been loads of speculation about what the times we’ve seen in winter testing mean.  Does the fact that the Brawn went quickest mean it is really the fastest car or are McLaren sandbagging?  We won’t really know until the lights go out in Melbourne but even if Rubens set that time running on fumes, comments from the other drivers suggest they are impressed by the car’s speed.  Ferrari’s Felipe Massa said:

No one can do the same times [as Brawn GP]. Everyone was using less fuel, not only them.  But their times were much faster than those that anyone else could do.

McLaren’s performance is also very puzzling.  There have been comments from Ron Dennis and Norbert Haug suggesting that they don’t have the speed they want yet but I get the feeling they aren’t trying for raw pace.  With the ban on testing this year I think McLaren are being very methodical in correlating what they see on the track with what their computer simulations tell them.  If they can accurately simulate the real world using CFD and racks of computers then they will have an easier time developing their car ‘virtually’, as it were, throughout the year.

They may also be playing their cards close to their chest, not wanting to give any advantage away that could be copied by other teams.  As Ron Dennis said:

We had a strategy for this year to leave it to the last possible moment to produce our aerodynamic package for the Australian Grand Prix.  That in itself gave us some production challenges, and we have really only started to run the car in the last day with the Australian aero package. It doesn’t mean you are lost or that you don’t know what you are doing.

So that was why they were running the 2008-spec rear wing?

It’s all very exciting and who will be on the podium at the Australian Grand Prix at the end of the month is anyone’s guess but after Ross Brawn previously downplayed his team’s chances and suggesting that 2009 will be another transitional year it looks like Brawn GP could be serious championship contenders.

Thursday was the final day of testing for Ferrari, BMW, Toyota, Force India and the two Red Bull teams before the season opener in Melbourne but Brawn GP and McLaren will grab a few final days in Jerez next week.

David Coulthard said that “Force India could be the shock of the season”,  but if Brawn GP carry their testing pace through to Australia it could be the Mercedes-Benz powered BGP 001 that is the real shock.

We all know about the spinoffs NASA’s space programme have brought to daily life back on Earth, particularly in medicine.  Now a new exhibition at the Science Museum in London will show us the benefits Formula One can bring to the real world.

The exhibition will feature unique items such as the Baby Pod II, Solar B Solar Probe and Ovei Wellbeing Capsule. The Ovei Capsule has been developed by McLaren Applied Technologies.

There is also a flywheel KERS device similar to the one used by the Williams F1 team, a carbon fibre table that is four metres long but just two millimitres thick and the world’s first commercially available ‘monocoque’ wheelchair.

Speaking at the opening of the exhibition on Wednesday, McLaren CEO Ron Dennis said:

We make a change to our cars on average every 20 minutes throughout the entire F1 season.  And we do that every season.  We innovate at such a rate, in fact, that technologies whose applications are far broader than racing are created as a matter of course.  Such technologies often have their genesis in racing cars, but then find suitability to products or situations never foreseen by their creators.

The exhibition is free and runs until April 2010.

Last month, when Williams introduced their radical ‘skate fins’ I wondered why Adrian Newey, the man who introduced shark fins to Formula One, decided to shrink the engine cover on the new Red Bull RB5 to little more than a ‘stingray barb’.

Well, it seems like he was just teasing us as Red Bull have arrived at the Circuit de Catalunya with the mother of all shark fins.  As you can see in the picture, the engine cover of the RB5 now stretches all the way back to the rear wing!  There’s a closer view at thef1.com.

The 2009 race season hasn’t even started and already the teams are seeing what kind of crazy stuff they can fit around the new aero regulations.  McLaren have installed a completely new floor with cutout sections near the rear wheels and whether the FIA will allow Williams to keep the skate fins remains to be seen.

I don’t really mind the standard shark fin and even those skate fins are ok but I think the Red Bull’s new engine cover spoils an otherwise good looking car.