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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.

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.

Jenson Button put the new Brawn GP BGP 001 through its paces in a shakedown test at Silverstone on Friday.  The team will head to the Circuit de Catalunya in Barcelona next week and then Jerez for a further three days testing before packing up and heading to Australia for the opening Grand Prix on 27-29 March.

As the pictures below show, Jenson Button is clearly happy to be back in a Formula One car and Rubens Barrichello looks happy just to be there.

Two main nose shapes seemed to have emerged in the 2009 car designs.  The BGP 001 has the low nose favoured by the likes of McLaren and Williams rather than the high style of the Toyota and Force India.  The sidepods are high and wide like the McLaren and the front wing seems to be quite a complex arrangement.

Overall I think it’s quite a nice looking car.  Enjoy the pictures.

Autosport.com have posted the first image of the new Brawn GP BGP 001.  Jenson Button took the team’s 2009 challenger out for a few shakedown laps of Silverstone today ahead of the car’s first full test in Barcelona.  According to Autosport, “the car features a wide low nose, and highly sculpted sidepods”.

There is also a distinct lack of sponsorship although that’s nothing new for this team…

But the big question on everyone’s lips is, will the car be be any good?  I think there are reasons to be hopeful.

Honda have produced some fairly rubbish racing cars lately but they knew pretty early on in 2008 that their car sucked and even sticking “dumbo ears” on it wouldn’t make it more driveable.  So presumably Honda switched their development to the 2009 car a long time ago; sooner, even, than BMW and news coming out of Honda over the last few months always seemed to point out the team were still working on the 2009 car.

Secondly, the Mercedes-Benz engine the team have acquired is looking pretty handy in the new Force India car and it powered Lewis Hamilton to the Championship last year.  I’m actually quite impressed the team have managed to fit the new engine so quickly.  We don’t know how long Brawn GP have had the Mercedes-Benz powerplant to work with but refitting the VJM02 to the new engine caused a lot of work for Force India as a change of engine and gearbox causes knock-on effects to other areas of the car.  Of course the Brackley engineers outnumber the Force India team but to get the engine integrated in a relatively short time is good work.  Whether this engine transplant causes reliability issues we will have to wait and see.

And lastly, they have Ross Brawn in charge.  The man knows his racing cars.  While Brawn couldn’t rescue Honda from the RA108 last year, this is now his team and he has been involved in the complete development of the new car.

So we won’t have an idea how fast the new car is until the Barcelona test and we won’t really know if can be competitive until we get to Melbourne.  Can’t wait.

Image: LAT

After months of speculation, rumour and no comment an official announcement has finally been made that the Team Formerly Known As Honda has been sold to Ross Brawn and will be named Brawn GP.  The name is still subject to approval by the FIA but at least there is no ‘F1’ in the name so Bernie shouldn’t object.

As suspected, the team will use Mercedes-Benz engines and will retain Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello as drivers.  Bruno Senna, the nephew of three-time World Champion Ayrton Senna, had been rumoured to be signed by the team but with so little time before the first race in Melbourne Ross Brawn clearly wanted two experienced drivers:

I am delighted that Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello will form our race driver line-up for the 2009 season.  The vast experience and knowledge that both drivers bring to our team will prove invaluable as we aim to get up to speed in the shortest possible time to be ready for the first race of the season in Melbourne on 29 March.  In what will be their fourth season together, their experience with our team in Brackley, our systems and our engineers, will prove a real asset.

Brawn GP are scheduled to conduct a shakedown of the new car on Friday before testing  in Barcelona between 9-12 March and in Jerez from 15-17 March.