Sitting down to watch my recorded Thursday night’s SPEED TV coverage of Formula 1 practice Down Under, in Melbourne, Australia Friday morning, it was entertaining to hear “Westminster Newberry,” Err Westberry Gillette; sorry ‘bout ‘Dat - Inside Joke! As ‘Ol Wes actually rung me up during SPEED’s replay of the Bahrain “Qualie” session... Telling me I needed to put meeze ears ups tooze duh phone ‘cause its really LOUD in the Pit lane and he didn’t want me to be sleeping thru the Time change! But I digress...
As Wes Gillette claimed that the buzz in the F1 Paddock was over the comments that the Virgin Racing VR01’s fuel tank was 12 liters too SMALL! And that the driver’s were gonna need to Pussy-foot about the circuit in order to stroke it home... Although Professor (Steve) Matchett was fairly blunt over the matter saying I DON’T think they really need to worry ‘bout it, as reliability is more of a problem for them at the moment, scoffing; if I was Virgin I’d simply filler-up with 60 liters and tell the drivers to go like HELL ‘til it darn Blown Up! To which Bob Varsha chortled in; or runs outta petrol...
And Professor Matchett quickly said; there’s NO dimensional requirements to the fuel tank’s size, albeit the Kevlar/rubber bladders are exactly the size of the tank and thus to increase it means you’d need to redesign the chassis!
Yet a USF1 Blog post on 2010 Fuel Tank design sheds a little further light on their design criteria. As it appears that there is indeed a maximum width dimension along with strick locations of the fuel tank’s placement behind the driver and ahead of the engine, therefore causing the chassis wheel length to grow approx. 20-22cm, with the McLaren MP4-25 thought to be the longest?
And Westberry Gillette noted that it seemed that the F1 Teams were thought to be carrying approx. 170 liters of fuel for the event at a usage (“Burn) consumption rate of 2.8 liters per lap... Why Oh Why does this all seem like a blur now? As AIn’T it SWELL how time flies...
So afterwards I sat down to try doing some writh-muh-ticken... Which is always a dangerous proposition and I’m certain some sharp Mathematician will prove my numbers to be horribly wrong, eh?
Yet I just cannot simply conceive how Nick Wirth ‘N Co. could get their numbers so WRONG? I mean the other three “Cossie” (Cosworth) runners have managed to run their numbers correctly and include a proper size fuel cell in their respective chassis... As the Virgin AIN’T gonna be a Virgin NO More, eh?
Virgin to redesign car because fuel tank is too small
