Sahara Force India F1 Team 2015

[Godius]

It's basically the same thing as last year where they introduced an evaluation of the VJM06, it wasn't any good but they were saved by the Mercedes PU + gear box. Ted Kravitz talked to Andrew Green in Mexico and from what I understood of the conversation, the VJM08 would be a further evaluation of the VJM07 with very little changes.

It seems that the other teams had already overtook Force India in the latter part of last year with their understanding of the PU and aero development. I really don't have much hope left for FI, they will most likely fight with the STR to not end last.

How was the VJM07 a slight evolution of the VJM06? They were completely different designs, I get that the VJM08 can be a small evolution of the VJM07 as there's some continuity in the rules. Also sometimes small tweaks can give big gains, sometimes millimeters can mean the difference between nice stable aero, and peaky inconsistent aero.

It was based on the same design philosophy, the major changed were built around the 2014 regulation changes, not because they were so keen on trying a new aero development path.

[Thunder]

http://www.jamesallenonf1.com/2015/02/f ... -marussia/

So now they don't even know if they are going to make it to the Third Test for the whole 4 Days.....

[Italiano]

It's everyone elses fault, just not theirs. =D>

[Phil]

It's everyone elses fault, just not theirs. =D>

I find this comment rather insulting to a team that has been long enough in F1 to know exactly how the dynamics of the business work and the relationship to their partners and suppliers to more or less know what needs to be done in order to be ready come testing. This is not any new team, or backmarker - we are talking about one of the established midfield teams that, like pretty much all of them, are struggling financially. Sauber is no better and Williams wouldn't be either if it weren't for 2014.

The harsh reality is that teams are dropping out - and their dropping out is also influencing other teams that are finding themselves struggling. The article or interview goes into depth to explain also that they understand their suppliers and that it's sort of a chain reaction that is leading to this unfortunate circumstance.

[multisync]

search out the list of creditors the 2 failed teams owe money to. It's not all big corps, a lot of small businesses are suffering because of them.
If 2 teams fold and take out a large number of suppliers or at the very least leave them hanging in the balance their credit line to their own suppliers is limited. Therefore they may be asking for cash up front because their suppliers are!

It's the butterfly effect. FI have always been bad payers 3 months minimum and now std suppliers are around 6 months.If FI are suddenly are asked for cash up front then they have got to scrabble round and find it. As mentioned they don't have a couple of million sitting around.

This issue is they are waiting for shareholders to pay them so they can pay their various mission critical suppliers (the rest can whistle Dixie )

Interesting that they may miss Barcelona as this week they are loading up their lorries with kit marked up as such??

[Phil]

Interesting that they may miss Barcelona as this week they are loading up their lorries with kit marked up as such??

In the above link, it sais "“The question for me is only how much of the third test we will participate in,” he added. “We won’t make the second test at all – although we are looking at taking the ’14 car there to do a little bit of driver and tyre work."

If they are loading up lorries, I assume it is for the 2014 car...

[multisync]

Interesting that they may miss Barcelona as this week they are loading up their lorries with kit marked up as such??

In the above link, it sais "“The question for me is only how much of the third test we will participate in,” he added. “We won’t make the second test at all – although we are looking at taking the ’14 car there to do a little bit of driver and tyre work."

If they are loading up lorries, I assume it is for the 2014 car...

yes definitely the '14 car but painted in '15 colours.

[multisync]

[Manoah2u]

so they've added some green to the bottom of the sidepods, wasn't there in mexico or on the 'livery reveal'???

[skoop]

maybe they wanted to get the indian flag back on it? it seems kinda off that they didn't think about that earlier

[Manoah2u]

maybe they wanted to get the indian flag back on it? it seems kinda off that they didn't think about that earlier

Yeah there were many comments on people 'missing the green'. The livery looks more finished now, to be honest.
Still hoping to see this team doing well on the 2015 grid. There's something about this team that gives it some sort
of 'underdog' position. It's great for them to have been 'batteling' with Mclaren last season. That must lift some spirits
up and give a sense of pride. I hope they're able to survive, instead of transforming into Renault F1 [according to rumours].

That said, with the upcoming 'big' F1 regulation change turning cars from 180cm wide to 200 cm wide and lower rear wings,
wider rear tires, more HP, 18 inch or 20 inch wheels [ or both, 18" front, 20" rear ], new tire supplier.....perhaps as early as 2016, but certainly no later than 2017,

gives me some thought of concern for these teams whether they are able to cope with the infinite heavy changes being thrown at F1 and thus at them with the paired costs.

Let's face it, Force India clearly is having money problems. They don't have deep pockets and obviously are in a difficult situation. Same goes for Lotus as it seems, and most definately Sauber.

But offcouse, these changes will bring huge development and research costs. The price tag on engines have skyrocketed recently, and i can't help but assume upping them to even higher HP will make them even more expensive. Add to that already costly tires, which will change to even lower profile will make them even more expensive. Add to that the change in handling and aero by widening the cars, and lowering the rear wing, is all food for huge changes in the current F1 format which, offcourse will have a need for money to cope with it; something above mentioned teams DO NOT have or can't afford.

Could this be the final year for Force India because of that?

[multisync]

maybe they wanted to get the indian flag back on it? it seems kinda off that they didn't think about that earlier

Yeah there were many comments on people 'missing the green'. The livery looks more finished now, to be honest.
Still hoping to see this team doing well on the 2015 grid. There's something about this team that gives it some sort
of 'underdog' position. It's great for them to have been 'batteling' with Mclaren last season. That must lift some spirits
up and give a sense of pride. I hope they're able to survive, instead of transforming into Renault F1 [according to rumours].

That said, with the upcoming 'big' F1 regulation change turning cars from 180cm wide to 200 cm wide and lower rear wings,
wider rear tires, more HP, 18 inch or 20 inch wheels [ or both, 18" front, 20" rear ], new tire supplier.....perhaps as early as 2016, but certainly no later than 2017,

gives me some thought of concern for these teams whether they are able to cope with the infinite heavy changes being thrown at F1 and thus at them with the paired costs.

Let's face it, Force India clearly is having money problems. They don't have deep pockets and obviously are in a difficult situation. Same goes for Lotus as it seems, and most definately Sauber.

But offcouse, these changes will bring huge development and research costs. The price tag on engines have skyrocketed recently, and i can't help but assume upping them to even higher HP will make them even more expensive. Add to that already costly tires, which will change to even lower profile will make them even more expensive. Add to that the change in handling and aero by widening the cars, and lowering the rear wing, is all food for huge changes in the current F1 format which, offcourse will have a need for money to cope with it; something above mentioned teams DO NOT have or can't afford.

Could this be the final year for Force India because of that?

The demise of FI has been predicted ever since VJ bought the team. At some point you will be right but they keep on going... and going.

Considering the state of team ownership that's pretty amazing IMHO

[Godius]

Interesting read:

WITH THE 2015 SEASON ABOUT TO START IN MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA THIS WEEKEND, SAHARA FORCE INDIA TECHNICAL DIRECTOR ANDREW GREEN TALKS ABOUT THE TEAM'S NEW CONTENDER, THE VJM08.

Andrew, now that the VJM08 has been unveiled, how would you sum up its new look?
The most significant changes from the outside are at the front of the car in order to conform to the new 2015 technical regulations. With the lowering of the front of the chassis and nose, the front of the car looks very different from what we had developed previously. It is a redesign that involved a lot of work over the winter, as the new regulations caused a loss in terms of downforce and we’ve been working to claw back all that performance. There are also some more subtle changes, like a modified sculpting of the sidepods and new cooling intakes.

The differences are not just on the surface. Underneath the skin there is a completely new rear suspension layout with a new hydro-mechanical system replacing the original torsion springs. This will allow us to explore new setup configurations for the rear of the car and will allow set up changes to be made much more quickly in the garage. Put simply it’s another tool for our engineers to use trackside during race weekends.

The second year in a new rules era is always crucial: what has been the philosophy in designing the new car?
The challenges we had to face were very different compared to 2014. Obviously, last year we had a completely new power unit and technical regulations so there was a huge amount of work going into just getting the car to the first race. This year, our focus is mostly on refining and developing the package we had in 2014. We are looking forward to building on what we learnt in 2014 about the VJM07: we understood the car’s strengths and weaknesses and we aim to build on the former and fix the latter. This has been the goal for building the VJM08.

The VJM08 had its first running at the final Barcelona test. How do you feel about the new car's debut?
Being able to run the car in Barcelona was very important and it allowed us to get a first understand of the machinery. It was a successful test in which we covered 365 laps without suffering any reliability issues, which is a very positive result as we look ahead to the first race. We were able to collect a lot of information that will help us from both an engineering and design perspective as we work towards finding the ideal set-up for the car and we start on the development pathway we have planned.

How will the shift to the Toyota wind tunnel affect the development of the 2015 car?
Working solely in the TMG wind tunnel will help our development significantly: having the ability to run 60% models will represent a significant step forward in fidelity of the data we receive and will in turn improve our correlation between the wind tunnel results and the on-track car data. The model itself has a significant increase in aerodynamic loading and it has been a challenge designing and building a new model in a very short time frame.

The tunnel, however, is not the only course we are taking to improve our performance. We are also looking to step up our simulator programme in order to deliver a ‘state of the art’ tool that will help us develop more in the virtual world and allow us to explore new directions and developments. The combination of the new wind tunnel and simulator will also be aided by the ramping up of our CFD capabilities; we are now operating with 30 teraflops of computing power - a massive change compared to the 0.3 teraflops we had five years ago. We expect the fruits of this investment to start feeding into the development of the car throughout the 2015 season and beyond.

Of course, these improvements wouldn’t be of any use without the right people making sense of the enormous amount of data. We are always looking to strengthen our engineering team and we have quite a few new starters joining us this season - new additions who will bolster our engineering capabilities.

The decrease of available power units to four per season has been a talking point during the winter. What impact do you expect it to have on the season?
I don’t expect that to be an issue. We effectively ran four power units only on Nico’s car last season, as the fifth only did 17 laps in Austin. Mercedes HPP have delivered a competitive engine, as they did in 2014, and in that respect and we are looking forward to running with the new spec power units in race conditions. Our working relationship with Mercedes-Benz is now in its seventh year and I am looking forward to strengthening our links with them: just as with our driver line-up, consistency is a prized asset in Formula One.

What else can we expect from 2015? Are there any other changes that played a part in the creation of the VJM08?
There are some subtle construction changes on the Pirelli tyres that will affect the rear of the car and a lot of work in winter testing has gone into examining these differences on track throughout the winter in order to establish any new setup variations resulting from them.

As the minimum weight limit has gone up significantly we don’t anticipate having any issues with hitting the minimum weight limit. This regulation change has given us more flexibility in some of our designs and also allows us to run comfortably between the two weight distribution limits.

There are also a few new partnerships which will bring advantages to the VJM08. We have started running Koni dampers: we worked previously with their technology in 2009 and it was important to us that we created a technical partnership in this area in order to have access to their damping technology expertise.

We enter our second season with Motegi Racing and, after a successful first season we have worked with them closely to develop a new wheel rim designs for 2015. We anticipate these updates will arrive early in the season and should represent a good step forward in capability.

Throughout 2015, we will be looking forward to bringing updates to the car from start to finish; the first significant package should be at the beginning of the European season and it will be the first batch of upgrades based solely on the work done at the new wind tunnel.

[WaikeCU]

I'm gonna mention this again. Hulkenberg did a solid job with the low performing VJM08. Started 14th on the grid and managed to make his way through the pack safely to finish 7th. Perez however made a lot of unexpected/unnecessary errors which caused him a better result. He overtook Ericsson while under the safety car. So when the safety car left the track he had to give Ericsson's place back. Ericsson was two cars behind him. So he had to let Button past him before letting Ericsson go by. He also went through the gravel trap on lap 6. Perez then eventually got stuck behind the underperforming Mclaren of Button and made a hell mess of it with his impatience by going banzai on the inside of the Mclaren colliding and damaging the floor of that Force India. While Perez seemed uncomfortable, Hulkenberg looks composed and drove solidly.

[Godius]

Force India had the fastest pitstop in Melbourne: