Racing Point tech head Andrew Green explains how they decided and then executed on the F1 2020 car design philosophy, where they wanted to do something different.
When the covers came off of Racing Point’s 2020 challenger at Barcelona, the aptly-named RP20, comparisons to last year’s Mercedes W10 came flooding in with it. This was on account of the fact that it bears an uncanny resemblance to the 2019 machine.
Along with the comparisons came criticism and controversy, as members of the F1 community called out Racing Point as they thought it was difficult on independent constructors to execute their own plans and compete.
This theory of sharing content was bolstered by the fact that Mercedes and Racing Point have a close relationship due to the fact that Mercedes provides engines and gearbox (a year old piece) to the BWT-sponsored team.
However, Racing Point technical director Green denied the above and rather said that the RP20 was 100 percent designed by his team of engineers and mechanics, who aimed to go for a new philosophy as they abandoned their old concepts.
“We wanted to fix something that had been haunting us for many years,” said Green to media including FormulaRapida.net. “Though we were adding performance to the car [since 2014] and it was getting better, it had this underlying Achilles’ heel that we were really struggling to get rid of.
“The gains we were making were getting slower and slower; the fundamental characteristic of the car wasn’t changing. We questioned the fact that there is only one more year left in the regulations so whatever we do in this year, we’re throwing this away.
“‘Should we do something different?’ and everybody agreed, ‘let’s do something different, try something different, start with a clean sheet of paper and let’s do something new’. Where do we start? Well we have a Mercedes power unit, a Mercedes gearbox.
“We’re running a 2019 Mercedes gearbox, which we’ve always run a year behind Mercedes on their gearbox supply. The suspension geometry of the Mercedes has always been [designed] to run a low-rake car and they weren’t going to change that for any money.
“So why don’t we try and join them, go that route and see where it leads us? So we tore up everything about the high-rake car and started again, started afresh. I can tell you absolutely, categorically all those designs are Racing Point from absolute scratch, there has been no transfer of information on listed parts from Mercedes.
“They have never contemplated it, we have never asked for it. What you see [on the RP20] is what people have drawn from looking at pictures of Mercedes. We’ve utilised what we can see. There’s other teams taking pictures. There’s a pit lane full of photographers employed by the teams to take pictures of other peoples’ teams.
“All we did was utilise that information,” he summed up. While it remains unknown as to how they will perform eventually but the lap times didn’t disappoint in the first test, where Lance Stroll was fifth fastest overall on C4 and Sergio Perez sixth on C3 compound.
They did less laps, though, with 369 but that is the usual from Racing Point. Meanwhile, raking about the car performance Perez spoke about RP20 having potential but he was hesitant to add too much with one more test remaining.
“The car definitely has good potential, there is still so much learning, things we have to do more of and information we need” he said. “It’s very early days to say anything. We are going to wait. Hopefully we can have a bit more of a read in the next week of testing.
“But at the moment, the car is feeling good, it has a solid base. We just have to work from there and make it better from now to Melbourne, that will be the key. We have worked very hard, it’s also a very good step in the car. We are going to keep improving.”
Here’s the details from first F1 test
Here’s an in-depth look at 2020 and 2021 regs for DAS-like feature
Here’s how Day 1 of F1 Barcelona test ended
Here’s how Day 2 of F1 Barcelona test ended
Here’s how Day 3 of F1 Barcelona test ended
The story was edited by Darshan Chokhani