F1 IN THE HIGH COURT
Italian counterparts. By June 2009, Aerolab felt
compelled to write formally to Force India to record its ‘persistent (and serious) breach of your financial obligations’ under the development contract, and inviting it to ‘cure forthwith your breach by settling our outstanding credit.’ The amount outstanding at that point was €764,260 (£638,625 / $1,018,180). Force India replied, proposing a payment plan, but then did not honour it. By the end of July 2009, Force India owed Aerolab €846,230 (£707,730 / $1,128,295), the equivalent of more than three month’s work. Enough was enough and, after the FOTA-enforced summer break in August, Aerolab packed all of the parts of the Force India model into a box, and sealed it. The contents would be shipped to Silverstone once the outstanding bills had been paid. When James Key, the then technical director of Force India, contacted Aerolab to find out the situation, he was informed that the facility was no longer working for the team and had been sub-contracted by its parent company, Fondtech, on behalf of another client.
EIGHT-WEEK LEAD That client was the Litespeed (that would go on to become Lotus Technologies Ltd) via Mike Gascoyne’s technical consultancy, MGI. At the end of July, the team had a 50 per cent model built to develop its car for the 2010 season. Aerolab was confident it could prepare a new 50 per cent model in just eight weeks, as 18 months earlier it had built a similar model of a Formula 3 design for Volkswagen, and the same engineer who ran that project would be in charge of the Lotus programme. Gascoyne told Tony Fernandes, who by now owned the team, in an email that ‘The most significant aspect to guarantee car performance for 2010 is the aerodynamic programme. The intention was to use the Fondtech tunnel in Italy for 2009, switching to full time in the sister Aerolab tunnel when it became available in Jan 2010. However, having discussed the situation with Jean Claude Migeot
backed up by an email that was sent out, which read, ‘invent as little as possible, unless time and costs dictate otherwise. Therefore use the previous F1 model as much as possible where design work is concerned.’ That previous model was the VJM02. An open and shut case you might think. Not so. The High Court judge ruled that the VJM02’s design was in the public domain by that time. It was also not very competitive and used a different powertrain to the T127. Crucially, though, the wheelbase had been changed by the ban on refuelling, meaning that 2010 cars would have to be a lot longer than the cars of 2009. Yet there were some clear
carry-over parts. The brake drums and ducts had been copied, or at least developed, from the VJM02, as had the wing mirrors, front wing end plate, driver’s helmet, rear brake duct winglet and driveshaft. Some of the front wing
One area of contention was the rear wing, which utilised some of Force India’s design data. But it was pointed out in court that it was not a copy of the VJM02 (top), which has a pillar-supported wing. Whilst the T127 initially had an end plate-supported wing (middle), later in the season the Lotus adopted a pillar wing developed independantly of the Force India data
of Aerolab, the Aerolab [tunnel] would be available immediately… I am proposing that we use both tunnels, starting immediately from August for the whole of 2009 and 2010… We are also starting from the current level of Force India due to the historical knowledge, not starting as a new team.’
Once the deal was agreed, 32
www.racecar-engineering.com • May 2012
CAD models of what would become the T127’s monocoque, side crash structures, rear crash structures, gearbox, suspension, wheels, nosebox and radiators / coolers were sent to Aerolab to start work on the new model. But the short lead time
appears to have led to some staff at Aerolab cutting corners in design work, a fact that was
profiles were also similar, and indeed based on Force India data, albeit arranged somewhat differently. The differences were that all three aerofoils were shifted down by 9.35mm, the distance between the trailing edge of the main plane and the leading edge of the primary flap differed by 0.39mm and the area between the trailing edge of the primary flap and the leading edge of the secondary flap differed by 0.52mm. Finally, the angle of incidence of the Lotus flaps relative to the main plane was increased by 6.6 degrees. The rear wing too was rather close in some areas to the VJM02 design. A Force India file was used to realise the specified rear wing geometry but, crucially, the wing assemblies themselves were quite different – the Force India rear wing was pillar- mounted, while the Lotus rear wing is end plate-mounted, which creates a major aerodynamic difference between them. In addition, the angle of incidence of the aerofoils relative to one another is different. To develop the new model,
Aerolab and FondTech’s aerodynamicists spent 1,336.5 hours and the CAD draftsmen 2,530 hours, for which Lotus was charged a sum of €132,144
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