These interviews were carried out at the BAR 005 launch in Barcelona in early 2003. Firstly technical director Geoff Willis had a group interview and later agreed to give me a one-to-one interview covering more in depth technical issues.


Geoff Willis Group Interview
CS: Were you tempted away from Williams as BARs aero chief or in a wider technical role?
GW: When I was approached I think originally they wanted a senior aerodynamicist, when I spoke with the team nearly 18 months ago now, it became clear to me they needed far more than that. The chief aerodynamicist position is a major part of the design of the car, the overall packaging, the overall concept and layout is largely driven by aerodynamic considerations, the aerodynamicist now becomes the chief designer anyway.
When I saw as much as I could of the what the problems were, it became clear that much higher level problems had to be solved, I said that what they really were looking for was essentially somebody of a technical director level who is considering the performance of the car as their primary job.

CS: Were you happy to step into the role? was it an ambition?
I suppose yes it is, it was the next step, I certainly enjoyed the change. It’s a much bigger picture you have the ability to look at every part of the car. I have spent a long time in certain specialist areas of the car and I’m certainly really much enjoying seeing a bit of everything, there a very steep learning curve, you have to make lots of decision between sometime conflicting input or clashing inputs from specialists and you have to learn to manage that part of the battle now is not just the technical level, the team your dealing with is 360 may be 400 people and its the technical management that’s much more important its no longer a ten man team where individual skill can make all the difference all the teams have got skilled people, its how you bring them all together .

Q: Are you more involved in Man Management
GW: Not really, there’s always man management in my old team I was managing in effect about 40 people, it’s a bit of the step. I don’t manage 400 now, but you have to put the structures in place.

Q: Are you happy to Delegate
You certainly got to learn to delegate, if you don’t delegate you don’t achieve what you want. It was quite easy to identify what was needed to be done, but you’ve had to do everything simultaneously, rebuild the design team, get the procedures working in the team, understand the problems with the car, react in time with the new engine to make sure that the overall concept of engine\chassis is brought together, work with the Honda chassis programme to get the best out of that, to get BAR working properly with Honda. Everything had to be done simultaneously, it’s a big challenge but very enjoyable

Q: Last year you said there was level you wanted to get with the team, have you got there.
GW: I thought that by the end of this year, with the new car we would have achieved 75% of where I wanted to get to in the long term and I think we’ve pretty much achieved that. To achieve that we’ve got to make another big step to during this year and for next year to be competing at the top level of the group.

Q: What programmes are you in charge of
We have a full aero program, we have a weight reduction programme, we have a chassis technology programme together with Hondas chassis development team. We will look at almost everything.

CS: Has there been a difference with Honda only supplying one team
GW there’s benefits to chassis and engine, in that you can come to a better agreement, we can clearly put little things like oil outlets and water outlets where we want them. If you’ve only got one team we can make it optimum, so we can make our chassis develop around the engine that’s only been developed for us.

CS: Gains for the engine program this year
HONDA: Weight of the engine itself, Lower the CofG will also be a big jump, we have a over 20kg weight reduction, we try to put it in the bottom of the engine, move more metal down.

Geoff Willis Private Interview

CS: Are you less involved in hands on work
Unfortunately under the role I now have, I have less and less direct involvement with the car, I do keep a specific interest in the aero things so I certainly do still see all the aero reports and still guide the aerodynamicists in the overall concept and I’m also responsible for the cheif engineers for the overall car concept. So for next year I am already thinking about chassis length, fuel volume, wheelbase, aero concept. I much more now a conductor for an orchestra, its actually something very interesting

CS: Is it as satisfying.
Possibly even more so, sometimes its frustrating you’d love to get on teh CAD and design a bot or do the analysis or whatever, its so dfferent you’ve got to keep changing. Sometimes it does mean you’re trying to cover lots and lots of things and keep a balance, but you see the overall picture. You’ve got the financial restrictions, you have the engineering problems at the track, the reliability and manufacturing. Its quite good in the sense you can never complain, because its up to you fix it.

CS: Heads of dept
We have three senior aerodynamicists with over 25 years of f1 experience, we have a chief engineer for composites, chief engineer for mechanical and under them there are heads of design heads of manufacture, head of R&D. Day to day I deal with the senior aerodynamicists, senior chassis designer, senior stress analysts, then I go around the factory to see the people on the shop floor.

CS: Operating groups
composites
Aero
mechanical
transmission
hydraulic
electronics
race engineering

CS: You use the Brackley tunnel and run at 50% scale
Yes

CS: actively pitch the car
its slightly unusual its an open jet tunnel which produce a number of advantages, we do the work in yaw, steer, pitch and roll

CS: transient
we would like to look at transient

CS: The aero concept of the car carries over from the update to the 2002 car
Yes, and its quite a lot more narrower at the rear end

CS: the bargeboard philosophy
we made a change last year we were stuck in a bit of a rut aerodynamically, so obviously I had some other ideas I’d been working on at my previous team, I gave those to the aero group and since then they’ve carried on evolving the car and now it might be a concept looking like other cars but it’s essentially a product of the BAR windtunnel group

CS: what are the benefits of forward mounted bargeboards
Slightly more cooling advantage, big bargeboards do have a penalty with cooling and they are sensitive those bargeboards. These are an alternative solution we have. The two sets of bargeboards are not hugely different from each other, we have tried both and continue to try both, at the moment that’s our preferred solution it might change in few months, we will just to see, we keep an open mind and let the tunnel do the figures

CS: Is the Front Wing the Melbourne version
Its certainly the first testing version were using, if we find a development well change it if not we’ll run this one

CS: Sidepods are major gain from the Volvo-esque side impact protection, is it due to cooling or structures
Bit of both we wanted to reduce frontal area of the car, the car was way to big, we’ve a much slimmer chassis at the back, gone with fuel volume. We wanted a more efficient cooling installation, a neater cooler installation and we were able to build smaller side impact structures with our better run, better organised composites dept. We’ve got very light weight, very efficient side impact structures which enable us to bring the side pods down and get rid of that frontal area

CS: The pitch of the chassis
The chassis higher from the dash bulkhead forward, its aerodynamics driven, its not good for CofG

CS: Bulkhead monocoque
Yes, internal bulkheads so all joints are bonded or machined, we’ve very tight control over quality

CS: Carbon bulkheads
Yes, all carbon, carbon inserts, carbon bulkheads, carbon all the way through. Which gives us high build quality chassis are coming out within 0.1% repeatability on weight so our process control is very, very high. That meant when we went for our first FIA crash we know it was going to pass, as we’ve done our homework it might sound cocky, but you’ve got to give that confidence to the drivers, those guys have got to know it wont fall apart.

CS: Chassis\engine\gearbox interfaces
We have no structural airbox in there, it is quite different its probably a little bit more conventional certainly a lot of attention was paid to the top engine mounts for structural stiffness, a neat installation and gearbox production.

CS: Gearbox uses Aluminium casting
Yes

CS: tightly packaged rear suspension
Lay down torsion bars damper bodies are inside the box, single rocker with a much simpler mechanism at the back, we have only two spherical joints in the whole rear suspension

CS: Wishbones in carbon due to exhaust position
One of the reasons, partly aero reasons and partly heat. We have to be a bit careful with it, we will have heat shields on it, we will be very cautious for the first few days, finding where the exhaust plume goes and how sensitive we are to cooling.

CS: Exhaust cover material
Ceramic epoxy matrix with woven carbon

CS: Exhaust Length
Optimised on the Dyno, Like a lot of packaging often arises from different things we wanted much lower deck remove the exhaust from the wishbones and the right exhaust length, so this is our solution for satisfying these problems

CS: 5into1
yes, I know some people do use two into one, two into one, and one into one

CS: weight loss in the engine
you try to get the overall weight to sub hundred kilos and at that point you principally lower CofG more than anything else. The reason you like to want to lose a bit of weight is to move the CofG longitudinally. We like a number of the other teams have some chassis ballast to move around and its a tuning aid, I would think most of the top team run 80-95Kg of ballast.

CS: CofG down more than 10mm
We quite a lot better than that

CS: Relationship with Honda
There are Honda engineers at Brackley, but BAR designs the car. With the Honda chassis project Honda are working a number of developments, R&D work, simulations, analysis what we don’t have the resource to do. They run some programs, windtunnel programs in parallel, so we trying to take the information from that program and feed it in. Some areas; we needed some stress analysts to help on optimisation laminates producing a lighter weight gearbox casting, last year lighter weight brakes for qualifying this season, its only to give us access to their R&D resources and also to give their engineers exposure to F1 technology, it also has a benefit as it means their chassis engineers can go back to Tochigi and talk to the engine engineers to give them a better understanding of why chassis designers ask engines to do certain things

CS: Chassis vehicle dynamics group
The vehicle dynamics group is most integrated with Honda we have about 12 Honda engineers related to chassis\vehicle work and another 12 to electronic and control systems that’s obviously one area where there’s an awful of benefit from chassis controls

CS: rig testing
we have 7post at Brackley, plus we have multi-post rig at Tochigi

CS: Steering rack
its very neat when you see it you will work it out, jorg zander (ex Toyota). its an aluminium bodied rack

CS: uprights
MMC below the 40Gpa limit,

CS: Keels Geometry or chassis height
The chassis is high up there, it is quite difficult to lift that inboard pick up point it affect your antidive and roll centre. We tried it with two different teams simply can’t make it work, structurally or aerodynamically, its not far off. Lateral installation stiffness. You’ve got to take control of the design process and not let it drift but fundamentally listen to what the windtunnel says you feel its not right

CS: What is the function of the Horizontal fin in front of the sidepods
I cal it a ‘Flow conditioner’, its managing the flow condition coming from the Front wing and bargeboards. There are a lot of flows coming around there, some of its tying to go underneath, so they’re controlling where the flows go under the floor and around the car

CS: Have you made the right gains for next year
You are never where the opposition is going to be, what this gives us is a car that’s at the right level of technology, it may be a bit further behind than we want, but at least now we are working from a basis, where we all composite, we’ve got an aluminium gearbox, we’ve got things in the right place, the right sort of ballast, we’re now in the game. Now its for us to try to right up at the front of the game.