TheGkbrk wrote:If this 18kg overweight thing is true what can the team do to decrease the weight?
Short Term:
Concentrate on loosing as much mass as they can from internal components whilst keeping strength and reliability, this can loose up to 80Kg in the V8 era, Colin Kolles did this with the HRT110 in 2010, reduced it from 740Kg (20Kg overweight) to 660Kg (60Kg underweight) meaning the car was up to 4 seconds quicker due to reduced weight and ballast placement. It was their only development path and only major upgrade they did. You can loose up to 20Kg from 50 new internal parts. Id recon the Radiators, Intercooler and even wiring looms are being looked at as a Wiring Loom can easily be 25Kg. So if you loose anything from 200grammes to 500grammes from lots of different components you can save 20Kg quite quickly.
Medium Term/Long Term:
New Chassis, this can take up to 10Kg off the overall weight, however the B spec chassis for these cars will take up to 25 weeks to have the R&D put into and constructed, this i think will be on the way as Ferrari usually change their drivers chassis about Silverstone time anyways. Past two years the teams haven't changed chassis as much as previous due to cost and time constraints in the layup department, i suspect this will be the case this year as well.
There is one thing that could be done, and thats work on the Energy Store, i think work on the batteries and the energy they store and how they are stored could be the major difference. Also work on the Transformers as well, as the AC to DC and DC to AC will yield results as well. Overall, this could be enough to loose enough weight to get a little ballast to play with.
Other than that, there really isn't much that can be done quick enough. Id recon that most teams will be having a small update for Sepang, but i do think that most teams will wait for Bahrain for their first decent update this year, but tradition and convention suggests that Barcelona will be where the first major updates are introduced and thats about 8 weeks away.