Spain: Barcelona Track Challenges Engineers


By Jamie Makin
May 3 2005

Team SAUBER PETRONAS have struggled this year in test sessions at the newly resurfaced Circuit de Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain. However, technical director Willy Rampf, is confident that his team can rise to the occasion.

"The Circuit de Catalunya has a wide range of corners, from slow through medium to very fast, so that makes it a very popular test venue and means that everybody knows it well. It exposes the character of a car and the tyres," Rampf explained. Aerodynamic efficiency is paramount, together with tyre performance. The track has been resurfaced, so it will be interesting to see what effect that has; in the past it has been very abrasive. Of course this year tyre degradation is a key factor as we can only use one set of tyres from Saturday qualifying on, so it will be interesting to see whether the situation has become better or worse."

New aerodynamic upgrades to the C24 at Imola produced better than expected results and that momentum should help the team this weekend. "We run high downforce at Barcelona, and I am confident that we will be in even better shape than we were in our recent test there as we have since introduced the revised rear-end aerodynamic package that gave us such a performance increase in Imola," said Rampf. "We have also since worked on our traction control and mechanical set-ups, so I think we can be in effective shape this weekend."

The engineers will face one of the greater challenges of the season with ever-changing track conditions. "One of the characteristics of Barcelona is that the track is very sensitive to temperature change, and as it rises the grip level goes down. You thus find that what works well in a morning session does not necessarily work so well in the afternoon, and continually have to make changes to compensate. This will make tyre evaluation challenging on Friday, and will surely keep the engineers on their toes!"

SAUBER PETRONAS - Prior Results at Circuit de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain: