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Force India Launch VJM06 Challenger In England

SILVERSTONE, England- After taking the new car out
onto the famous Northhampshire circuit, Team Force India launched their new
VJMO6 challenger Friday afternoon with quite an unusual situation.
New co-team manager Robert Fernley and Scotsman Paul
Di resta stood next to the new entry-however, the second driver still has to be
confirmed. High rumors indicate that Jules Bianchi and German veteran Adrian
Sutil are the best possible choices, but Fernley is keeping his other options
open.

“The
shareholders are thinking about where the drivers are going to be,” he stated, ”
but our main objective today is obviously to launch the car and make one or two
important announcements. We don’t want to confuse the two stories.”

The
car, as all the earlier launches, mainly feature a vanity panel to cover up the
stepped nose design, but the team is not in a hurry to implement it.
Nevertheless, but most of the car is pretty much a duplicate of last year’s
design. However, technical director Andrew Green believes that the new entry
looks very positive.

“We’ve
pushed the guys quite hard in areas outside their comfort zone”. He said. “Most
of It is under the skin and you can’t see it from here [the outside], but rear
suspension, front suspension and aerodynamics have all been pushed hard and
they’ve done a really good job in the wind tunnel. The car is a step up and
improvement from last year and we’ve worked on consistency to make the car a
lot easier to drive.”

Green
also added that the reason for the delay on the stepped nose was for this car,
the performance gain was better off without it.

“For
us, net – and when I say net that is aerodynamic gain versus weight/centre of
gravity height – it was net up. It may only be very small, but for us it was a
net advantage, so we take it. To be honest, if the step nose regulation wasn’t
there why would you ever design a car with a stepped nose? I don’t think you
would. I don’t think anyone would have come up with that idea of ‘let’s go and
put a great slab of chassis in front of it’.

“So
it never inspired us as a concept to have, and by putting the panel over the
top of it it tidied up some nasty features on top of the chassis that we just
weren’t happy with. You could see them in the CFD blocks, you could see what
was happening in that area and were thinking ‘that can’t be good’. You put it in
the tunnel and you can see it; it’s small but it’s a 100g or 200g panel and the
net result was a marginal improvement.”

Hopefully
the improvement will have an effect on the season to achieve better results
this season.

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