Despite being thrilled to see Virgin Racing's car unveiled in England on Wednesday, Nick Wirth will be keeping his feet on the ground this season as the Sheffield-based team makes its Formula 1 debut.
With John Booth's Manor GP having become Virgin Racing following the buy-in from Sir Richard Branson, Technical Director Wirth makes history this year after developing the first ever computer-designed Formula 1 car, with no use of a wind tunnel.
"We are a serious racing team with serious ambitions, so we aren't going to try to run before we can walk," the Englishman explained. "The starting point is to try to run reliably, safely and efficiently and be the best of the new teams; then we will start to bring performance to the car through a continuous development programme in computer simulation.
"We fully expect to encounter issues along the way; CFD is an approximation - as is scale-model (wind tunnel) testing. In both cases, it is only when you hit the track that you can really appreciate the effects of factors that are tricky to model with any technology, such as the effect that the real stiffness of all bodywork components and joints have on the airflow, for example.
"We have two very focused and determined race drivers in Timo Glock and Lucas di Grassi. The significant effort they have been putting in behind the scenes over the past couple of months in the simulator will prove invaluable as we start to translate our development work to the track-based testing phase."
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