Alpine, Haas make wing tweaks after China F1 flex test changes

Alpine and Haas have revealed they have needed to make changes to their Formula 1 cars’ rear wings in light of the latest technical directive that has tightened flex tests.

It is understood that four teams were affected by the changing parameters of the rear wing flex tests for the Chinese Grand Prix as the FIA felt that a series of pre-season changes to tighten up the tests for the Melbourne round did not go far enough.

Ahead of the season, a rule was introduced to the technical regulations stating that, if 75kg of vertical load is applied on either extremity of the rear wing mainplane, the slot gap must not change by more than 2mm.

This was changed for China with the addition of a technical directive, and this limit was reduced to 0.5mm. For Shanghai, this came with a 0.25mm tolerance, which will be removed for the Japanese Grand Prix.

Alpine’s racing director Dave Greenwood conceded that the Enstone squad was one of the teams that needed to make changes to its wing geometry to ensure the slot gap remained static.

Greenwood did not wish to expand on the specifics of the changes to the wing, but lauded the team for following the regulations in such a short space of time.

“There’s a change in that [technical directive] for this weekend, and we’ve complied on both occasions,” Greenwood explained.

“We’ve had to do some work back at the factory to make sure we were in the correct place here, but I think that’s fairly normal in these situations when a rule and an allowance of deflection changes, you need to check that you are going to be able to comply with that as well.

“There’s work that needs to go on to to make sure it’s compliant, but that’s been done and we are there.

“I think you can imagine the timescales were very small, so it’s not like you can do something revolutionary, but yeah, there are things we can do to make sure we comply.”

Haas team principal Ayao Komatsu revealed that his squad was also partly affected by the changes, stating that “we may have to change a little bit how we set up the wing, but not the design or anything”.

McLaren denied that it was one of the teams affected by the technical directive, particularly as the outfit was arguably the biggest proponent of using the slot gap to dump drag in straight lines – as demonstrated by its ‘mini-DRS’ in Baku last year.

Its technical director of engineering Neil Houldey stated that the wing deflection the team had experienced was already less than the figure the FIA implemented for the China weekend.

“Luckily, when we were tested in Melbourne and the numbers that the FIA chose to put in the TD are higher than the deflection that we’d seen,” said Houldey.

“It’s had absolutely no impact on us at this event, so the performance should be no different for us.”

When asked about the lower-downforce wing, run briefly in Melbourne practice, he added: “I think we’ll be OK with that one. That one hasn’t been through the same process as the the high-downforce one that we’re running now.

“The expectation is that again we’re not going to be losing performance from the TD as we go further into the season either.

“We would certainly struggle [if the team had to make changes in one week], so it’s fortunate that we were in the position that we were and didn’t have to make any changes.

“I don’t know how other teams have managed it, but maybe there are set-up changes that they’ve been able to make that don’t require new components, or maybe they’ve had to make something incredibly quickly to get it here and become legal.”