Slick tires replace the grooved ones, and together with KERS will demand major engineering efforts from the teams as 2009 nears. (LAT Photo)

Adrian Newey (Red Bull): “It’s a new challenge for the engineers, which is great. I must admit my reservations. The biggest problem is a question of resource. As Sam said we are all in a position where we are all for our various different reasons desperately trying to improve this year’s car, but at the same time we are conscious that you have got to start researching a very different car for next year. If you had limitless resources you would divide everything in two, you would go to four wind tunnels as I believe Honda are using at the moment, and off you go and start research. If you don’t have those resources then it is a much more difficult juggling act. The last really big regulation change we had was 2004-05, when the front wing was lifted considerably. The great thing as far as I was concerned about that rule was it didn’t really come out until the beginning of July, by which time we had all done the bulk of our development for that year. We could all go off starting from the same place, and do our best in the time available. This one is very different. We have known about it since November-December. As Pat says rules are still subtly changing but we have known the essence of it for a long time, so it really is a question of how we divide resources.

“The rules have an even more extensive set of exclusion areas where you can’t put bodywork than we have currently, and on top of that there’s a regulation where there’s a minimum cross-sectional curvature from near the front of the side pod, all the way to the rear axle which is designed to try and prevent flick-ups and winglets and so forth. In that sense, they are pretty thorough, they are quite complicated, they’ll certainly create a much simpler looking shape, I think, in all cases. From a purely technical point of view, it’s quite fun at the moment to have a new set of rules to get your teeth into and think about, but ultimately they will be a more restrictive set of regulations. It depends on your viewpoint as to whether you think that’s a good thing or not.”

Willy Rampf (BMW Sauber): “For us it is a very demanding rule change and quite different to the last years. In the last year we had always a fluent transition from the one car to the next one as the regulations changes were fairly small. This is completely different now because we have to run the development project parallel which is not so easy, because we have the one wind tunnel. It means we have to divide the capacity of one wind tunnel and currently we are doing a lot of work on CFD to sort out the basic requirements and then go into the wind tunnel.”
Aldo Costa (Ferrari): “Again, it is very interesting but it will be very difficult to measure change in aerodynamics. We have also got the KERS and the tires. This will require a rethink of all of the mass redistribution of the car. It will mean a lot of studies – not only aero study, but also a lot of research in the KERS area, a lot of research in the basic car layout, so it is very demanding, so strategic choices during this year will be to be focused more on this year’s car or vice-versa. It will be very difficult to do.”