Lotus believe their nose design, dubbed the ‘twin-tusk thanks to its appearance, is providing a performance advantage over the lower noses adopted by rival teams.
There are three main variants, the ‘anteater’ adopted by the majority, the lower ‘vacuum’ adopted by Mercedes and Ferrari and then Lotus’ unique concept which has two nose, though only once is counted under the regulations because of their varying lenghts.
Speaking to Autosport about it, technical director Nick Chester revealed that according to their simulations, which have been backed up by on-track running, the ‘twin-tusk’ design is proving advantageous.
“From the aero numbers we are getting back from the car, it does seem to be performing,” he said.
“I’m not going to give you a number on how much better we think it is than a standard low nose, but we did see what we thought was a significant benefit, which is why we chased it.”
He admitted he was surprised no other outfit had developed a similar solution, and hinted that it would now be too late in the season to copy.
“The one thing that is difficult with the nose is that it is quite hard to structurally develop and crash test it,” he explained.
“Obviously, it is a different structure to a standard nose and it did take quite a lot of iterations to get it to a point where we were happy and it went through the crash test.”
