Williams Blog: Week 26

Posted on Wednesday 24 Jun 2009 and tagged with team, blog.

Ed Wood is our Chief Designer so his weeks are a constant stream of design meetings to ensure development of the current car is kept on track while also ensuring the smooth progression of next year's car. Read his blog to find out what he was up to last week...

Ninety percent of my time is dedicated to next year’s car at the moment. The programme is going well, but I have to oversee the updates being made to the current FW31 as well, so it’s a real juggling act.

My weeks are pretty structured because I have regular meetings with the seven heads of department that report to me, as well as with Sam [Michael, technical director], Patrick [Head, director of engineering] and pretty much anyone who has an influence on the design process.

Monday is generally an overview day; it’s when I review the major design programmes and set objectives for the week. If we’ve had a race the day before, I’ll liaise with John Russell, our systems engineer, and go through any problems that were experienced at the racetrack over the weekend.

On Tuesday morning we have what we call the TES meeting, when all the design and production staff gather to review the status of new parts and any upcoming developments on the car. We had a massive push last week to get two sets of the update kit on the FW31 – new front wing assemblies, floors and pieces of body work – to the British Grand Prix, so a lot of this meeting was dedicated to that. But we also looked at the job lists for Nurburgring and Budapest.

On Tuesday afternoon I chaired a meeting about the rear end of next year’s FW32 and this was followed on Wednesday morning by a design review meeting on the FW32’s front end. This was attended by Jon Tomlinson (head of aero), Chris Brawn (head of steering, suspension and brakes), Sam, Patrick, Clive Cooper (head of composites) and Colin Martin (stress office). We’re well on the way to identifying improvements on this year’s car, while pinpointing the ramifications of the front tyre being 25mm narrower.

Thursday was my final day in the office last week. It started with a KERS review with Ed Haynes and Steve Wise, the main engineers on the programme. If KERS is permitted again next season, it will give more of a performance advantage than this year because there will be a need to get weight further back in the car due to the new front tyres. We’re still working on a battery KERS and a flywheel, and we plan to get one of them on the car as soon as possible.

I also helped RBS with some training videos on Thursday, as well as doing a general review of the week’s progress. With everything on schedule, I headed to Silverstone to see how the update kit would perform.