Marussia are confident that the work carried out in McLaren’s wind tunnel last season and over the winter will pay off in 2013 as they look to gain ground on the midfield.
The outfit struggled in its first two seasons as their design relied solely on Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) rather than a mix of CFD and wind tunnel data.
Last season they signed an agreement with McLaren to use one of their two tunnels, which driver Timo Glock believes played a pivotal role in their end of season performance surge which saw them catch rivals Caterham.
“I think the wind tunnel work paid off since we went to McLaren, and that looks very positive for the future,” said the German.
“I didn’t think that we’d close the gap as we were 1.5 seconds off Caterham, then we closed it very quickly over the second half of the season, which is great.”
New team-mate Max Chilton is optimistic for 2013 too, should technical advisor Pat Symonds projections become a reality.
“The car sounds very, very good,” Chilton told GPUpdate.net. “With the addition of KERS as well, that’s just free time. There’s no loss of time by installing it. KERS in itself would put us further up the grid and if we’re having the car they say we will then it’s going to be a very promising year. Pat seems to think we’ve found a lot,” he added.
