Formula One news
2008 Williams breaks cover at Valencia
21 January 2008 / PhotosThe Williams team's 2008 season race car, the Williams Toyota FW30, took to the track at the Valencia circuit in Southern Spain this morning for a shakedown prior to starting its winter testing in earnest tomorrow. The team's newly recruited test driver, Nico Hulkenberg, is taking on the responsibility of shaking down the new race car before regular race driver, Nico Rosberg and his team-mate, Kazuki Nakajima, share first assessments of the car from tomorrow onwards.
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The car represents a clear engineering philosophy of iteration and progressive development from the competitive and reliable platform of last season's FW29. The team's technical director, Sam Michael explains, "With four years of regulation stability, we have a good basis to be progressive about the development of this season's car. With a good reliability record last year, we have been able to build on this quality while also turning some of our attention to clear performance objectives."
The car retains the general structural and layout philosophy of its forebear, featuring a zero keel and dual pillar rear wing, with notable visual changes including a three plane front wing, increased sidepod top cooling louvres in view of the altered orientation of the water radiators, the sidepod and side impact sails and the increased cockpit sides for compliance with the new driver safety requirements.
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"Our focus has been on performance as well as refining our packaging and weight distribution. We are designing a tidier car with a higher standard of build quality. The FW30 should represent a good step forward when all of the many small areas of attention and improvement are brought together in the overall package," said Michael.
Prior to the roll-out of the FW30, the team has also spent considerable time and made good headway in attending to a number of the other regulation changes, such as the integration of a standard ECU and the outlawing of traction control. As much as a busy winter for mechanical designers and CFD aerodynamicists, specialist code and software engineers have been busy rewriting strategies that will govern the management of the car's main components, from the new seamless shift gearbox to the differentials and engine.
The FW30 is also biofuel compliant in order to meet the new season requirement that all race fuels contain 5.75% biomatter. Having worked in tandem with its fuel partner, Petrobras, the team was the first to use biofuel as part of a Formula One demonstration run in downtown Rio de Janeiro last October.
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