Williams introduces new front wing

By Andrew Hooper
July 19 2018

 
 Williams introduces new front wing
 

The British Grand Prix would see the Williams Martini team introduce several updates to the FW41 in order to turn their season around. But instead of producing an improvement in performance the updates made the car more unstable, producing a stall of the rear wing. Now two weeks later the team has brought a new front wing to the German Grand Prix in order to make its car more predictable.

The new wing is designed with the idea of not necessarily producing more downforce but to improve the car's balance, something that has been missing for both team drivers Lance Stroll and Sergey Sirotkin.

Speaking about the wing Sirotkin said: "It doesn't give us any more lap time on paper. But what we really expect from all of these bits to do is to give us a stable platform.

"As a consequence, it will give the drivers more confidence, but it all starts with getting the airflow stable to any other external situations."

Sirotkin spoke of how the new parts were vital to improving the performance of the FW41. Sergey added:
"It is quite important, because we've been working on these bits for quite a long time."

"We do really hope that it will do this [provide more predictability] and if not, it will mean that we have some deeper correlation problem which will take more time to solve - and which are obviously more painful for the team."

The new Williams wing sees features that are designed to change the nature of the airflow across it and following on from that over the rest of the car. These design features include a mainplane whose edge has been upturned in order to encourage more airflow to flow under the wing. The design is also aimed at improving the pitch sensitivity of the FW41 under braking an acceleration. The design of the flaps has also been altered to improve the flow over them and the vortex's that are produced coming off the various elements of the wing.

 

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