16/01/2012
NEWS STORY
Former Renault technical boss, Pat Symonds, now working with Marussia, believes the ban on blown diffuser technology will aid the smaller teams this season.
Symonds, who lost his job with Renault, and was temporarily banned from the sport for his role in the Crashgate saga, is now a consultant with Marussia, formerly Virgin, which has finished last in the standings in the last two seasons.
"The major change for 2012 is the fact the blown diffuser is going away," he told fans at an exhibition in Birmingham at the weekend. "For small teams like ours that is not a bad thing. It was difficult to understand and make work, and the new regulations make things a little bit easier.
"Marussia in total employs about 170 people, compared to about 650 for Red Bull and 550 for Lotus and Mercedes. It's an enormous challenge, and we have a mountain to climb," he admitted.
The Englishman believes that the new technology being brought into the sport will reinvigorate it.
"F1 is heading in a better direction than say 10 years ago, when it was manufacturers or nothing," he said. "I think with cigarette advertising and then manufacturers everyone got a bit arrogant. Now we have the Resource Restriction Agreement which is a genuine attempt to cap costs. We also have KERS - I think when it came in I was typical of a lot of people in that I thought it was for someone else, but when you start to work with the systems you see the potential.
Marussia's 2012 contender will be the team's first car not designed entirely with CFD, the team, having disposed of the services of Nick Wirth, now adopting a more conventional approach.
"The main thing was to get the integrity back into engineering," said Symonds, "to look at everything we did and question it. We've started windtunnel testing now, which is not so much kicking out CFD but wanting to check the integrity of our changes.
"Our alliance with McLaren is also a good thing," he added. "It was obvious we had to do something different; that we weren't going to achieve the timescales required without doing that. McLaren will not be an instant (solution) but it will maybe make us faster."