Manor technical director John McQuilliam admits the British outfit would have preferred the 2017 rules revolution “to come a year later” but insists “there is enough time” for the team to get ready.
F1 chiefs recently voted through new regulations for next season, which will see the introduction of wider cars and tyres in a bid to make the sport more exciting with lap times up to five seconds faster than at present.
The radical changes are bound to place smaller squads like Manor, who already went through a major overhaul last winter and just introduced its first new chassis in two years, under more stress than factory teams.
“It’s going to be a challenge for us of course,” McQuilliam agreed. “I guess we would have preferred the regulation change to come a year later. The thing it does mean is that there is no carryover of parts, so it means that there has to be a brand new car with enough spares ready at the first race.
“Almost every single part will be new for next year and for a small team it’s a big task to redesign effectively every single component on the car and being a small team we have to very much do that in series rather than in parallel.”
Although 2017 regulations were only finalised last week, these had been discussed for several months, thus giving teams enough leeway to implement a suitable plan ahead of next year according to McQuilliam.
“There is enough time,” the Manor technical chief added. “We have known [for a while] what the regulations were. There has been a little bit of uncertainty as to whether what agreed early in the year will be carried forward.
“I believe it will be and we’ve been working on that in CFD [compututational fluid dynamics] and in the windtunnel, so we have a small development programme running for 2017. It’s a balancing act between how much time we spend on ’16 and ’17, but there is enough time to do it.”
Williams technical chief officer Pat Symonds also called for a one-year adjournment of the regulations over the winter.
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