Caterham technical director Mark Smith says there is room for improvement – Formula 1 news
Caterham technical director Mark Smith says that the team has room to improve.
He explained that heading into Shanghai the team realises that it needs to work on a lot of areas to improve and try to extract the best from the car. The tyres are also important and will play an important role in setting up the strategies.
The technical team has been looking into these factors after the recently concluded Malaysian Grand Prix. There are a number of plans that are to viable for implementation and will prove to be beneficial in moving the team forward in Shanghai.
Weather is going to change a few strategies and China is naturally lower than in Malaysia but there is still rain expected over the race weekend. Looking into these factors and the track it is likely that overtaking is going to be a difficult task.
Especially that the track itself is not a good one for overtaking, and this will make things very interesting in Shanghai.
“The track surface is relatively smooth and the kerbs are generally not an issue in China, so we will take these factors into account when we plan the optimum setups for the weekend. We still have yet to run a dry race in 2012 on a full grand prix circuit
which means that we have a limited amount of tyre information for the Chinese GP weekend. That puts a premium on the importance of running tyre programmes in FP1 and FP2 and gives the engineers a lot of work to do on Friday night,” said Smith.
He further added and said that the team will be running the cars in high down force configurations. The car will have bodywork updates mainly targeting efficient cooling and increased load.
Still the plans are a bit tentative as the weather will have to be looked into prior to the race. Another aspect that has some updates are brakes and although China is not bad for braking it is tweak that the team is going to make anyways.
It will be interesting to note Caterham’s progress as the season moves to Shanghai.
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