RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil – Eager to asses his new winglets in a real life track environment, Spanish pilot Alejandro Maclean took the brave step of altering the configuration of his wing set-up during Friday’s training sessions. Usually such alterations occur from one race to the next but the strong-willed pilot called upon his whole team to ensure the switch could take place in just minutes between the third and fourth sessions.
“We did the very first training session with the larger winglets but we’d been having doubts about whether they were working,” says Maclean, who followed in the footsteps of fellow MXS-R pilot Nigel Lamb when he unveiled wing identical extensions in Perth last month. “It was very difficult to draw any conclusions without a track and a proper analysis. We decided we’d done one good run so we thought let’s change them and give it a try with the smaller versions to see how it affected the times.”
VALUABLE TESTING TIME
A thirst for innovation has seen teams across the board introduce more and more radical mods in the past few seasons but with tight shipping deadlines between races and no practice tracks available, teams have struggled to quickly measure success. Maclean’s ambitious decision to swap the carbon fibre components and ultimately disrupt the set-up of the wings, was certainly a gamble but it looks to have paid off.
“With the old wingtips back on the results were awful, really bad,” he confirms. “That was in training 4. I then switched back to the bigger ones for compensation training, although I didn’t have a chance to get the ailerons right. I couldn’t catch up after that. It was OK though and today I will fly with the first guys and that’s actually something I like. I have more time and I can relax.”
TURNING ABILITY v SPEED
The winglets are believed to provide better turning ability in the track but the larger surfaces can cause drag on the straights – potentially a deal breaker on the Rio track. “It was obvious from the results that it was much better with the winglets on,” continues Maclean. “We’ve been analysing the flight with the video and all the numbers. The flight without the winglets was quite accurate, with no penalties, but the performance was not there. The plane was not accelerating and it was losing a lot of speed.”
Bolstered also by the team effort that enabled the seamless switch for the testing, Maclean says he is very proud of his team for pulling together. “The four of us worked in the perfect combination and we did the change easily. The coherence of us all really made me proud. That would usually take half and hour and we did it in minutes. It proves that the team is getting better and better,” he added.
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