Force India technical director James Key

Following our exclusive interview with driver Adrian Sutil last week, James Key, technical director at Force India F1 Team, gives Ellie Zolfagharifard the engineer’s side of the story.

There’s three streams of development that a team would look at. One is performance, that’s just outright power performance, which is the most obvious bread-and-butter stream for everyone. The second is the subtleties of making the car more drivable. Control systems come into that and the driver plays a very important part in this. The third stream of development is reliability. You want to make sure the car is always reliable, but as light and robust as possible.

Yes, we have methods of teaching the drivers how to use the systems in the car. We have hardware systems at the factory and we already have a set up with the controls on, so they are able to train with a steering wheel with a real ECU in a virtual car.