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less developed than most of its competitors and lacking in performance, so much so that both cars failed to qualify for the race. It is has since improved and both cars have made the cut at every race since, with a highest finish of 15th at Monaco. However, the team is still the least competitive in Formula 1. ‘Our biggest lack of


performance is simply aerodynamics,’ says Cuquerella. ‘There are other things we may be missing compared to the top teams, but 90 per cent of the difference is on the aero side. Really that’s the main task of development, because the car was built in such a short time. We have a group of aerodynamic engineers in Munich, Germany, and we use the second Mercedes wind tunnel at Brackley to test. ‘You can see from looking at


all of the cars on the grid, they are beginning to become very sophisticated aerodynamically. When these rules started, the cars were very simple, but now that has changed. This is the result of the stability of the regulations and the effort the teams have been putting into exploiting them. If you look at the front wing in 2009, for example, they were all very simple. Now they’re very complicated again.


We are in the process of getting there too, but we are so far behind. At the moment, in every session in the wind tunnel our car is very good and very productive because we’ve had so far to go forward. With the other teams, sometimes you can come back after a week in the tunnel without having found anything really useful. We were always finding something, but it is still not enough.’


ROLL OVER The short gestation period of the car means that it carries over many concepts from the F111 and the Dallara F110. But it is actually quite a different car. ‘When the aero people started in September, they did not have enough time to properly evaluate the car concept and come up with a new one, so they started with the baseline of something they knew from the 2011 car. That’s why it looks very similar to the old car but, if we had started earlier, it would have been a lot different.’ One of the major aerodynamic


developments of the F112 was to optimise the cooling, compared to the inefficient F111. ‘That has changed completely. The radiator cores are much smaller, because the car last year was a bit too


After being behind schedule in 2010 and 2011, the principal aim of the re-vamped HRT was to be ready for the 2012 Australian GP


“a big [target] was to be quicker in comparison to the rest of the field than the last car”


July 2012 • www.racecar-engineering.com 21


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