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Interview by Greg Spotts, Exclusive to SpeedCenter

Chassis Intrigue: Speedcenter Interviews Lola and Swift Engineers at Nazareth

One of the major developments this season has been escalating competition amongst the chassis constructors. This year sees the dominant Reynard competing with Lola and Swift for customers, as well as efforts by Penske and All-American Racing to field cars developed for exlusive use by each team. The results at Nazareth show exciting progress for nearly all five chassis, with Reynard winning the pole and the race, Lola missing the pole by a mere millisecond and challenging for the lead until Helio Castro-Neves crashed, and Swift and All American Eagle finishing in the top ten. Adrian Fernandez has had great success this season running "Frankenstein," a '97 Reynard with '98 sidepods and a '99 suspension, so in fact there are six different cars going for the pole at each race.

During the Friday and Saturday practice sessions at Nazareth, Speedcenter explored the highly secretive world of chassis development with Simon Marshall of Lola and Brian Lisles, of Swift and Newman Haas. Note their different perspectives on the sharing of data between teams and constructors, the subject of the recent Speedcenter feature "To Share or Not to Share."


 

Exclusive Speedcenter Interview with Simon Marshall, Design Engineer at Lola (Interviewed on Saturday morning May 1st after final Nazareth practice)

Question: You guys are having a very good weekend so far, how come?

    Simon Marshall: Yeah, very good. The car's bloody good this year. It was good last year, we think it's better this year. Hogan's doing very good job and Helio's a killer driver.

Question: Is Helio a good driver from an engineer's standpoint, to develop the car?

    Simon Marshall: Oh yeah, definitely.

Question: Is it more difficult to develop the car when you only have a few cars of data coming in?

    Simon Marshall: Yes, but it tends to happen that when the cars get up to the front the feedback from the teams isn't as good, because they can develop the car on their own and don't need the manufacturers help as much.

Question: So you're saying the teams are sometimes holding back some of their better ideas from you at that point?

    Simon Marshall: Oh yeah. We've been in that situation before.

Question: Were you with Lola when Lola was the dominant force in CART?

    Simon Marshall: I started on the Champcar in late '96, so I kind of missed the good period. It's been a hard struggle for three years working to get to a good point.

Question: Do you think you guys have an edge on Reynard on the ovals right now?

    Simon Marshall: Yeah.

Question: How about the road courses?

    Simon Marshall: No, I think we're fairly even on the road courses. They may have a better package. We know we've got to work on that.

Question: Why is Jourdain so far behind Helio this weekend?

    Simon Marshall: A number of reasons. That's all I can say.

Question: You can't tell me anything more than that?

    Simon Marshall: No.

Question: Are there things that Hogan is doing in setting up the car that you can't pass along to Payton-Coyne?

    Simon Marshall: Again, we don't really know what Hogan are doing with their setup. We've got an idea, but as long as the car is running in a good area for downforce, then after that it's a matter of fine details. Downforce is everything, and then we have springs and bars.

Question: What's Lola's goal for this year, the best case scenario?

    Simon Marshall: If we were running consistently in the top ten, it would show that the car has a lot of potential to try and attract additional customers next year.

Question: How many customers would you want ideally, and is there a number that would be too many?

    Simon Marshall: We couldn't cope with too many, but that's something for our commercial people to work out. It's not as if we're going to deny anyone cars, we're not in that position yet. We'll sell the cars, and then we'll make it happen after that.

Question: Is there a particular design element that gives you the edge over the Reynard on the ovals?

    Simon Marshall: Yeah, but again, that's...

Question: It would be talking out of school to say so?

    Simon Marshall: Yeah.

Question: Would it be obvious to the naked eye?

    Simon Marshall: No, it's not. We've seen the Reynard. We look at the Reynard car a lot, we've seen their guys looking at our car. It's hard from just looking at the cars to pick something and slap it on your car which will work. It's the whole package very much, I think.

Question: What are the biggest visible differences between the cars?

    Simon Marshall: Nothing really. There's a lot of [wind] tunnel work going into our short oval program. This business is won and lost in winter in the tunnel.

Question: Do you think you're going to get the pole today?

    Simon Marshall: There's no reason why we shouldn't. If we don't do it now, I don't know when we will.


Friday April 30th open Q&A session with Brian Lisles, Swift Consultant and one of two Chief Engineers at Newman Haas.

Question: Newman Haas seems to have had much more success with the Swift so far this season than the other teams. Why?

    Brian Lisles: We also had a little bit of trouble early on, we had to work with Swift as the other teams did. There's been some major improvements made to the Swifts since January of 99. We're seeing the benefit of the hard work that was put in by Swift and all the customers together. Of course you have to keep up that kind of improvement throughout the season.

Question: Is it harder to develop the Swift because some of the people who would be running it aren't running it and there's less data coming in?

    Brian Lisles: It may be more difficult globally for Swift, given clearly that Reynard have a very large base of good teams all presumably contributing information. You can assume that there must be in total more information coming in. That must make life easier in some ways, but of course if it's contradictory information it makes it much more difficult. I don't know. We've been three years at Swift and basically up to this point it's been just us and Swift. Before that we used to deal directly with Lola, so it's kind of what we're accustomed to doing.

Question: Is there anything that you guys come up with that you don't tell Swift because it's so good?

    Brian Lisles: No, we tell Swift, but there are some unwritten rules about what information gets circulated to other teams within the season. You have to make sure that anything you do to make the car better, anything that improves the car has to get incorporated in the next year's car. Safety is carte blanche, safety issues are immediately discussed amongst the teams.

Question: You know you're going to lose downforce due to the smaller wings used at Nazareth this year, but is there anything that you can do to the chassis to gain some of it back?

    Brian Lisles: Oh yes. That's an ongoing game, isn't it. I think any racing car constructor probably has a baseline of improving the aerodynamics within a given set of rules at about 10% per year in terms of downforce. So if we were racing here a year ago with these rules, we would have had 10% less downforce than we have now. The new wing package did change our focus slightly, because for this configuration we have to re-examine the center of pressure. That is where the aerodynamic load is being applied, it is now in a slightly different place. So we did have to do a little bit of mechanical and some aerodynamic work. It's not a big deal.

Question: Do the wings effect one chassis more than another, can one chassis make more adjustments than another?

    Brian Lisles: No I don't think so, I'd be very surprised.

Question: It's just a matter of the drivers adjusting?

    Brian Lisles: Everybody has to make the adjustment, the drivers and the teams. We have to learn what we need to do to make the car balanced and pleasant to drive and produce the most grip. The drivers obviously have to understand at what level the car can sustain what it is they want to do. It's a learning process for everybody, but they probably learn a little quicker than we do. They have to deal with it moment by moment. They are good learners.

Question: Is this more of an adjustment than the Hanford device was?

    Brian Lisles: No, I don't think so.

Question: You mentioned you had to adjust the center of pressure. Would you possibly use a different undertray?

    Brian Lisles: No, it's all adjustable externally.