A place to discuss the characteristics of the cars in Formula One, both current as well as historical. Laptimes, driver worshipping and team chatter do not belong here.
The problem with these new cars is that they are just simply re-skinned, and re-badged GP2 cars. Most of the "regular" cars are underweight and use ballast to fine tune the balance. These new cars don't carry over the type of materials used on the regular ones, since their base comes from a lower formula. Hence they are mostly overweight.
The Acura lmp2 cars were dogs when they first came out, they didn't even have 3rd springs. They just re-badged and re-skinned a Courage LC70 and stuck a new engine in there. It wasn't until the year after that the car became radically transformed all that was left was the tub.
Perhaps Wirth think he can get away with this sort of engineering, which goes to show how different Lmp racing is to F1
If so, how can these cars (apart from the HRT machine) be directly comparable to GP2 ones? Does this mean that the GP2 car designs are public knowlege?
I know i some times over-speculate, but the above is drivel.
The 3 new cars arnt based on a GP2 car, firstly their design is totally diffrent to a GP2/05 or even the new GP2/11 chassis. The HRT may have simmilar design concepts but even that is diffrent to the most part.
The Virgin and Lotus are totally diffrent, they are coming from a lower base because of material compromises, for example steel components and not carbon, and hydrolic systems that are about 5 or 6 years out of date, even a 2006 car has better hybrolic systems to what was in the 3 "GP1" cars you could call them.
You are right on the ballast thing as the material and system compromises mean theres less ballast to throw arround and ballance the car, but thats only about 50% of the problem. The other half of the problem is also design compromise as well, the fact that the designers of the cars have had to make cars that can relyably work on the track, also last a race distance not to mention go as fast as they can. Ultimatly those compromises lead to the sheer lack of load going thrugh the tyres and the apex of grip isnt there. Typically the "GP1" cars are arround 30-40 points off a car such as a Force India, and up to arround 70 points off a McLaren or Ferarri, and are probably as much as 80 off the Red Bull. To give some wild numbers for refrence.
My opinion on this topic of the new cars being not much faster than a GP2 car is the level of development/refinement for the GP2 cars are probably higher. I like to think of it as the BGP01.. it wasn't the fastest base design as we saw it's speed plateaued after midway through 2009, but the level of refinement from the outset was way above the rest. These Virgins and Lotus's pretty much were designed and built in six months not to mention just a few days of testing. I am not too knowledgeable of the time and work that goes into making a GP2 car, but It must be more than anything those Virgins, Lotus's and HRT's ever got.
