Williams to test 2017-focused wing again in Mexico

©WRi2

Williams will test a special front wing which focuses on the 2017 regulations for the second time at this weekend's Mexican Grand Prix.

The team ran an experimental front wing on Friday in Austin, which is designed with next year's new aerodynamic and tyre regulations in mind. Chief technical officer Pat Symonds confirmed the wing would again run in Mexico to get further understanding of its impact on the car.

"We’re running it again on Friday in Mexico because we need to get a certain amount of data on it," Symonds said. "[So far] it correlates well with what we were looking to do. So it’s not an advantage to us this year, it’s just a thing we want do try for next year.”

However, when asked how much teams are able to learn for next year while running the current cars, Symonds replied: “Not at lot.

"That’s the difference this year, so when you have incremental changes to the rules you are always carrying on in the wind tunnel developing a car. You might change the model number, but a lot of what you are doing is relevant.

"If you come up with something that is really good and you say ‘Sod next year! We’ll get on with that now!’ then this year, what we’re doing in the wind tunnel isn’t relevant really.

"Funnily enough about a month ago we did something on next years car that worked really well and we thought ‘Crikey!’ and we never tried it on this years model, we just quickly put this years model back in and thought ‘that doesn’t work at all’ so it’s just one of those things.”

TECHNICAL SNAPSHOT: Austin

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.