RallySport Magazine February 2017

DESIGNING A WORLD RALLY CAR
THE CHALLENGE OF DESIGN
The 2017 rally car revolution has
been like no other in the story
of world championship rallying,
explains Martin Holmes.
When the WRC cars were restricted
in 1973 to Groups 1-2-3-4, the cars of
most teams already complied.
When the Group B cars came along
in the early ‘80s, each team introduced
their new designs at different times
and when they were banned for the
start of the 1987 season, no new
designs suddenly appeared.
When World Rally Cars appeared
in 1997, the only fully compliant car
came from Subaru, then when the
1.6 litre format arrived in 2011 there
was only Ford and Citroen, with Mini
coming along a few months later.
Now, in 2017, there were four teams
present at Monte Carlo, all with brand
new designs, all at once. These are
days to remember!
M-Sport’s chief engineer, Chris
Williams, looked around the Service
Park at Gap remembering how the
hectic year leading up to the 2017
WRC season affected them and the
other teams.
CW: Everybody has been working
behind the scenes in secrecy and at
the same time dealing with regulations
that were quite fluid. Initially
everybody was working on different
M-Sport
engineer
Chris
Williams.
ideas.
Then the rules changed round a
little bit, details were clarified. What
I do notice is that there are common
themes among all the four teams’ cars.
I don’t think there have been different
philosophies between the teams. I
have also noticed that some teams’
people have taken greater risks,
specifically with aero, but basically the
cars are what we expected them to be.
We’ve looked at some things and
gone in one direction and others
have gone another. We’ve been quite
introvert, looking internally, making
sure that what we’ve got we’re happy
with, and that we hope we have a
reliable and durable package.
What has been the biggest design
challenge for each of the team?
CW: Keeping your aero together in
one piece is fundamental. If you have
more fragile parts and start knocking
them off, then you’re going to lose
performance fairly quickly.
I think some people have taken
more risks than others in this respect.
You can’t change the aero design from
event to event, so we have all had to
balance our aero to be suitable for the
whole season.
On certain events you’ll have an
advantage with fragile stuff, but on
the rougher stuff you lose out. But
everybody’s done their own analysis,
everybody has their own philosophy
and their own approach.
We have to make sure the
performance of the car isn’t
severely limited if there is damage,
so robustness of the aero is a
fundamental factor. But on the other
hand, we are here to race and not
here just to finish rallies.
At the end of the day you have
to look for the performance and
then look to make it durable. If you
compromise too much you’ll always be
behind.
- MARTIN HOLMES
44 | RALLYSPORT MAGAZINE - FEBRUARY 2017