On Monday, Williams presented its new look for the 2023 season, which in many respects follows the livery with which it had concluded the past championship. Blue remains the main color, while the bare carbon has been replaced by a matt black paint, again in order to contain weight and improve performance.
The livery was unveiled on the 2022 car, as the new car is still being assembled at the Grove plants ahead of making its shakedown debut at Silverstone next week.
However, during a meeting on the sidelines of the team colors presentation, in which Gulf’s entry as sponsor was also announced, Dave Robson spoke about the design innovations of the FW45. The new single-seater will not be a revolution, but an evolution of the path undertaken in the middle of last season, when the technical group chose to substantially modify the side panels, aligning themselves with the solutions proposed on the cars of other teams.
The initial idea was to have even more sculpted bellies, but some restrictions in the arrangement of the radiators did not allow for all the planned changes to be made, having to postpone part of the work to the FW45 project.
“It’s an evolution. Visibly, well, you’ll see. But obviously the regulatory changes relating to the floor dominate a part (of the design choices) “, explained the Williams technical manager referring to the regulatory changes promoted by the FIA for the next championship, such as the increase in the central part of the floor by 10 mm and 15mm for the side edges.
“Then I think the other thing you’ll find most evident will be an update to the side panels, which will be an evolution of what we brought with the Silverstone update package (in 2022), but back then we were a bit limited by the layout of the radiator and didn’t want to change it completely. So we had the opportunity to work on that and set things up a bit differently. But they are probably the most visible things. But, philosophically, it’s an evolution,” Robson added.
One of the strengths of last season’s FW44 was represented by its low drag characteristics which had made it one of the most competitive single-seaters in terms of top speed and resistance to forward movement, as evidenced by the good performances at Spa and Monza. A philosophy which, however, did not pay off on highly loaded tracks or on those with many slow corners, where the greatest difficulties were encountered.
With the new project, the team has also attempted to intervene on these aspects, with the aim of making the car more competitive on all kinds of tracks throughout the world championship: “The low-speed and high-downforce corners were certainly important to us in terms of how we developed the car. I think a lot depends on its characteristics and how the riders can exploit the load it has,” added Robson.
“We’ve worked a lot on this aspect. It’s difficult to set a lap time target for something like this and then comparing it to baseline downforce and drag can be complex. But we think we’ve set some good targets.”
The Williams FW44 in 2023 livery
Photo by: Williams
“We think we have seen some good progress when we took the aero map data from the wind tunnel and passed it through the simulator with the riders. Done”.
Thanks to the position in the standings, Williams was able to have a greater number of hours than its rivals in the wind tunnel, but the technical director wanted to underline how this element must be placed in the right context, as great efficiency is still required in car design.
“Is useful. We hope we made the most of it. But it is clear that one must be extremely efficient and not rely only on more time and more resources. We will then see what the others have done. Obviously, the change in the regulation will have wasted everyone’s time. It certainly wasted our time. But we hope to have the opportunity to recover all this and more. But only time will tell.”
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