Richard Branson’s Virgin Racing has launched its first Formula 1 car, the Cosworth-powered VR-01. Virgin is the first of the new four F1 teams to unveil its car.
However, the on-line launch did not go as planned. Technical issues prevented the broadcast from taking place as scheduled, so the car was revealed via the team's website later than expected. Wirth Research, the British company headed by Nick Wirth, designed the VR-01 using massively CFD technology rather than the traditional wind tunnel. Virgin's F1 project was officially launched in December, when Lucas di Grassi and Timo Glock were announced as its drivers. The team fired the Cosworth-powered car up for the first time last week, and will conduct a shakedown at Silverstone on Thursday and Friday. Wirth -- whose company designed the LMP2 and LMP1 Acura endurance cars in the past few years -- acknowledged that the CFD approach had limitations, but insisted wind tunnel testing was no different. "We fully expect to encounter issues along the way; CFD is an approximation - as is scale-model testing," Wirth said. "In both cases, it is only when you hit the track that you can really appreciate the effect of factors that are tricky to model with any technology. We've done all of this before on both closed and open-wheel cars, so I'm pretty confident in the accuracy of our predictions and looking forward to seeing how our starting configuration performs on the race track." Photos: Virgin Racing
Recent Articles
|
Racing Multimedia
Recommendations |