Williams Formula 1 team principal James Vowles has explained how the team responded to one of its cars being disqualified from qualifying for the Dutch Grand Prix due to a rearward portion of its updated floor being too wide.
Alex Albon’s qualifying result was expunged after the FIA found his car’s floor body to ‘lie outside the regulatory volume’ mentioned in Article 3.5.1a of the technical regulations. That line in the regulations identifies a floor body reference volume, which consists of several measurements that are further defined in Point 5 of the rulebook appendix.
Williams didn’t dispute the accuracy of the FIA measurement system at Zandvoort and accepted its sanction, but pointed out that its own measurement system produced a different result.
Ahead of this weekend’s Italian GP at Monza, Vowles explained what Williams did next, both to ensure the car was legal for the race at Zandvoort, and to maintain compliance for subsequent F1 rounds. For the former, Williams removed the surplus floor body material from Albon’s car with 400-grit sandpaper to ensure it could race on Sunday. Albon went on to finish 14th after starting from the back row, but the British-Thai driver reckoned he could have finished in the points without his qualifying DQ.
‘[The] investigation still ongoing, which tells you how complex the problem is,’ said Vowles. ‘We have two sign-off methods at the factory. The first is in a jig, fundamentally, that is replicating the legal floor width. It fits within that. In other words, it is legal to the width of the jig. The second is on-car, in the factory, which was completed on Tuesday. Both of those checks revealed that the car was effectively legal.’
To double check the width ahead of the Italian GP at Monza, Williams conducted one further measurement on Thursday that showed the car as being ‘slightly over’ the FIA’s limit.
‘By slightly over, I mean decimals of a millimetre,’ added Vowles. ‘However, we did two things. You are always adjusting the floor to make sure it is aerodynamically in the correct region. I personally believe that one of those adjustments put the floor into a region where it was slightly more illegal than that. That pushed us over the limit.
‘With these situations, you’re always trying to get things to about zero. You don’t want to be under by two millimetres. It’s not important everywhere on the floor, but there are a few regions where it is important.’
According to Vowles, the rear section of the floor where the width was beyond FIA limits is not one of those more important areas. The floors on current F1 cars are responsible for producing downforce through ground effect, as air is accelerated through Venturi tunnels carved into the bottom of the car.
‘[It] is not important aerodynamically whatsoever at all,’ claimed Vowles. ‘We could have easily been under that. What it ultimately comes down to is we didn’t do a good enough job scanning and replicating the exact procedures the FIA do. When you’re talking about decimals of a millimetre, it doesn’t [take] much to move you out of that position.’
The Dutch GP was a tumultuous event on the other side of the Williams F1 garage too, as Logan Sargeant crashed heavily in third practice. The impact with the left-side metal barrier, after the American put his car’s right wheels on wet grass, caused a fire that destroyed some components. Sargeant was then dropped from the team on Tuesday and replaced by Williams junior Franco Colapinto, although Vowles was adamant the crash did not influence the timing of his decision.
The accident was, however, damaging because Williams had brought a substantial upgrade package to the Dutch GP, which included the new floor geometry.
‘If you have attrition or an accident that happens when the update kit is about four races old, you can write it off to a certain extent because you can replace it with new,’ said Vowles. ‘When it happens about 200km in, that’s painful. [It is] the most painful time for the team to have attrition – it hurts.
‘We have an amount planned into the budget. Where it’s more hindered me, is we have more updates coming and we’re now spending time building componentry that I wish we wouldn’t at this point in time. [It is] distracting us away from the future.
Albon described the Dutch GP package as the first half of a two-pronged attack towards the end of the season.
‘In terms of balance, not really anything to say,’ he commented. ‘Just a bit more load. All the numbers came back positive. They were up, so that’s nice. I think we’re more in the mix with the midfield. It’s still close and we would need a bit more to get in front of everyone.
‘This is part of a double package, so we’re waiting for a second part of it a bit later into the season, and hopefully that will just tie up some of the balance problems, because we’re not just missing load, we’re missing a bit of balance as well.’
