The Russian Grand Prix of 2014 was something of a watershed moment in Formula 1. As Vladimir Putin presented the winner’s trophy to the Mercedes Grand Prix team, the staff of two other teams already suspected that they faced unemployment when the cars got back to Europe. While the Caterham F1 Team continued to fight for its existence as RCE closed for press, the Marussia team had quietly closed its doors and auctioned off its wares. The team was one of three new outfits that entered F1 in 2010 (as Virgin Racing), initially with the understanding that a £40m coat cap would be applied. That limitation on spending fell by the wayside, and the three new teams had to fight for their existence. Virgin Racing became Marussia F1 following investment from a nascent Russian supercar constructor. That company collapsed in late 2013 after producing very few cars, but the F1 team bearing its name continued, not least due to the support of the Chilton family and Ferrari, Max Chilton being one of the team drivers, as well as Ferrari junior driver Jules Bianchi. At the Russian Grand Prix it was clear that the team did not have the funding to continue and despite a number of rescue attempts, including one that saw the cars loaded and ready for shipping to the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, the team went into liquidation.
Around 190 people lost their jobs when the team finally closed its doors, among them some of the most promising young engineers in
Britain, as well as some of the most experienced. The Marussia team had long had a philosophy of blending the best and most innovative young engineers with some of the most seasoned senior technical staff in Formula 1. Racecar Engineering has been in
touch with a number of these now unemployed staff and has discovered that the car that they were developing was probably something a bit special, especially considering the budget constraints the team faced. ‘I’d say we were a bit different in the way the
engineers were hired to other teams,’ claimed one former team member. ‘The guys that came here out of university usually came with a bit of racing experience, maybe from a year out or maybe from racing before they got to uni. It was not just Formula Student, though that was really important. As a result the staff tended to come from the more practical universities like Oxford Brookes or Cranfield,’ he explains. This resulted in the team having a group of young engineers willing to work hard and experiment, and perhaps the ultimate
expression of this was the stillborn 2015 design. Internally staff referred to it as the MR04 but, due to bankruptcy of the Marussia car company, the team planned to change its name to Manor Grand Prix, in deference to Team Boss John Booth’s Manor Competition team which ran the likes of Lewis Hamilton in the junior categories. The 2015 car would have been known as the Manor MNR1, and it had reached an advanced stage of design before the team collapsed. Following the team’s entry into administration and later closure, its assets were auctioned off to the highest bidder and this [
]d the wind tunnel model used to develop the aerodynamic package of the MNR1. As part of the auction catalogue images of the 2015 design were released, revealing much about the cars concept.
Immediately apparent is the low nose of the design. This is a result of a subtle rule change for the 2015 season, introduced purely for aesthetic reasons. When the 2014 grand prix cars rolled out in public for the first time in Jerez, Spain they were widely ridiculed as the ugliest ever, some more polite people likened them to a Proboscis monkey but most people including the UK’s leading ‘Adult Entertainment’ store likened them to sex toys. The FIA and the team realised that it was unacceptable, and for this season the rules have been changed. This has led to a far more elegant looking design overall, with the front nose height blending gradually towards the nose tip, which on the MNR1 still has an exposed front crash structure. Aerodynamic demands, however, saw the lower portion of the chassis remain at a similar height to the 2014 car leading to a much smaller front bulkhead. Indeed it appears to be less than half the size of the 2014 design, and this is an area where the innovate spirit of the Marussia engineers is highlighted. The 2014 Marussia MR03 uniquely utilised a metal front bulkhead for cost and adaptability reasons and it is a concept that would have carried over to the MNR1, albeit on a much smaller scale. ‘I know everyone looks at us oddly for that but we felt it was good in terms of weight and stiffness,’ says another former team member. ‘Also, it gave benefits as all of the bolts and things on the bulkhead were not required to be inserted as per a fully carbon design. They could be final machined along with the rest of the chassis and threaded as required. It was so much easier.’The low cross section chassis of the MNR1 was apparently made possible by a breakthrough in the car’s suspension concept.
Exact details are not clear but the layout of the internal components was something never previously seen in grand prix racing.
‘The ’15 car was quite different in terms of suspension, as the vehicle performance mob had been let off the leash for the first time,’
one of the team’s former engineers claimed. ‘They had a significant input in terms of simulation to define the suspension. The heave
and roll split was done differently in terms of springs and dampers front and rear. But the front was a bit special; it got rid of the the usual left/right torsion bar but still maintained an additional third element. ’He would not be drawn on the exact details of the layout but suspects it will be employed on some other 2015 or 2016 cars after the former Marussia staff find berths in other teams. ‘Our system was small and compact as it used gas springs rather than coil springs, ’another team member reveals. ‘In reality though, on these cars with so much to package in side pods and so on, even a small gain is useful so losing the interconnected suspension in mid 2014 really helped us.’On first inspection of the wind tunnel model the MNR1 chassis appears very similar to that of the Marussia MR03 but detailed inspection reveals it is anything but. The monocoque was to have been fully reworked in terms of composites in an attempt to save weight, a process generally common to all teams but in 2014 Marussia had faced a larger uphill struggle than its rivals. ‘The 2015 design was all about sorting out the details a lot more for the new rules,’ says a team member. ‘Changing powertrain supplier at the end of ’13 as well as powertrain type was a big task for a small team last year and there were so many late nights. Everything was different, which is true for the physical parts as well with other teams but for us it was also true of the people and the procedures way we worked, it was all so different. With the 2015 car we had a year of data and much more experience with Ferrari. ’Nobody had really expected the Marussia to be on track at the opening test in 2014, especially as the likes of Red Bull were struggling badly, and at the start of testing in Jerez the team failed to turn up with a car. But a huge effort in its Banbury HQ plus an overnight drive for its truckies saw the team arrive at the circuit and clock up a few laps. ‘I could not believe the effort that every one put in to get the car running in Jerez. It was amazing,’ an engineer says. ‘We had so many issues but when we look back now a lot of those issues were small, but it stopped us getting the most out of the car performance-wise.’ A colleague of the engineer in question added; ‘We just didn’t have the ability to even think about performance as we were fighting too many small fires. But what we did is sort those issues out quickly and had a reliable car.’ That reliability had almost become Marussia’s trademark. Driver Max Chilton had finished every grand prix he had ever started, totalling 25 straight finishes until the 2014 Canadian Grand Prix, where he ran into his team mate. ‘In designing the 2015 car, much more emphasis was put on performance than reliability which we knew already was good. For example in packaging electronics we were dealing with incremental change not a completely new system that we were learning about as we designed it,’ one of the car’s designers adds. ‘Also in many areas we had a baseline, which was probably reasonably conservative as we knew that reliability would be king. So from this baseline we were obviously able to work properly on optimising weight, stiffness and CG height with a good baseline for how far we could push it in terms of reliability.’ In other words Marussia – or Manor Grand Prix as the team would have become know – expected to be a lot more competitive than in previous seasons. ‘The 2014 car was on the weight limit but
we could not exploit it in terms of the forward weight distribution,’ a race performance team member reveals. ‘For 2015 there would have been the additional ballast allowed by the regulations at least but also more as it was clear that redesigning to the 2014 limit the car could have been at least 10kg lighter.’ As the MNR1 was to retain the Ferrari power unit (albeit in 2015 specification) the cooling
system layout was to have been generally similar. As with the 2014 car an intake below the main roll hoop would have been a feature
of the car feeding additional coolers at the front of the power unit. This area of the chassis was quite neatly packaged as above it sloping off on each side were two rhomboid shaped heat exchangers feeding from the roll hoop via a Y-shaped duct similar to the 2013 car. But here the difference would have ended, as the overall cooling layout was substantially different based on the team’s experience and data gained during the 2014 season. As a result (and also of improvements made by Ferrari) the cooling apertures on the car were much smaller. The rework of the cooling system also changed the overall architecture of the car – the wheelbase for example would have been drastically reduced in comparison to the 2014 design – being more than 100mm shorter. ‘The MR03 was quite conservative with cooling layout especially around the roll hoop fed coolers, this meant that we had to use a relatively long fuel cell, but on the ’15 car those coolers were different and the tank was more conventional’ another engineer admitted. ‘Aerodynamically this turned out to be a really good thing with new avenues for development opening up which hadn’t worked as well on the 2014 car. The aero guys reckoned this was due to the front being better at relating to the rear in terms of flow structures.’ The images seen here of the MNR1 wind tunnel model show the cars overall aerodynamic concept, as well as the new low nose the car also features an all new front wing as well as a revised rear wing. Marussia’s engineers felt that they had some tricks up their sleeves with the aerodynamics of the new cars and the claim that a new nose treatment and rear wing support were part of that. However they will not reveal details of these solutions, hoping that they can carry these tricks to new employers. ‘We had some really nice updates planned for mid-season which were in the raw concept stage,’ says one of the team’s youngest engineers. ‘I’m not telling you what they were or how they worked because I want to have something other than just experience to show new employers. I reckon the other teams will be thinking about some of it, they are not stupid, but I think maybe that the Marussia solutions were perhaps simpler but still got a performance benefit!’
Overall, though, the design was visually very similar to the 2014 car. ‘It was an iteration of 2014. As the rules were young I expect most
people will be following this trend, although the nose area will of course be different. The model was being developed with three different front wings initially and this was a major area of development,’ one of the aerodynamic team claims. ‘We were significantly up on the 2014 car when worked stopped in September.’ The Manor MNR1 was expected to be a Q2 regular, unlike the MR03 which regularly struggled to get out of Q1. When worked stopped many team members knew that the writing was on the wall, but they did not want to believe it. While bigger more established outfits pigeon-holed young engineers, Marussia allowed them to experience
the full range of modern competition car engineering, partly by its overall philoshopy and partly because of budgetary restrictions.
‘The small teams were very important for raining young engineers,’ rues one of the team’more experienced former employees. ‘Everyone talks about the drivers but its the technical guys with talent that are harder to find. In the same way young drivers used to be schooled and experienced through the small teams like Minardi, it is very similar for the engineers. ‘With a small team the younger guys tended to have responsibility for a lot more areas due the lack of resource.’ For this reason it is likely the staff behind the design of the MNR1 should be in high demand as they have been shown to create a good car under a tight budget. This way of working could be a crucial performance advantage if and when any cost or resource restriction is applied to grand prix teams. ‘You will never find a better or more skilled group of racing enthusiasts,’ one of the teams senior management concluded sadly. The Marussia MR04 or Manor MNR1 reached the stage of becoming a wind tunnel model, but went no further. Once McLaren had removed the elements of the model that it owned, including the spine and support pictured here, the MNR1 became a sad pile of 3D components that were hawked off to raise money, including the design computers and team equipment. The MNR1 is sadly a car that will be consigned to the pages of obscure Formula 1 history books. However those behind it seem certain to design world championship challengers of the future. CVs of former employees are available through the MIA and other outlets.
да это то я видел - своего рода тизер к основной статье - полную статью из журнала вытащи я говорю - хотя ладно не утруждайся 
