First image of Lotus E22 released
Lotus E22 (Image: Lotus F1 Team)
Lotus have unveiled, at least partly, their 2014 F1 car, the E22, on Twitter. The image was released just moments after McLaren’s official unveiling of their car, the MP4-29.
The Lotus features a quite different front end to the McLaren. Where the MP4-29 has a single, centred, narrow nose, the E22 features an unusual-looking double-pronged nose. It remains to be seen whether or not any of the other teams have adopted a similar approach.
The Lotus features the longer sidepods and rear-exiting exhaust required by the 2014 regulations. The livery is an evolution of that seen on last year’s E21, with the front end seeing the major changes in terms of paint-work.
The E22 will not be present at the first pre-season test that starts in Jerez, Spain on Tuesday. Instead, the car will make its track debut on 19 February in Bahrain.
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2014 Lotus to skip Jerez test
Romain Grosjean tests the Lotus E21 at Jerez in 2013 (Andrew Ferraro/Lotus F1)
Lotus Technical Director Nick Chester has confirmed that the team’s 2014 car, the E22, will not be unveiled until after the first pre-season test. As a result, the car will not run in Jerez at all and will make its track debut in Bahrain on 19 February.
“We’re going to keep our car under wraps a little longer than some other teams”, said Chester. “We’ve decided that attending the Jerez test isn’t ideal for our build and development programme. We are likely to unveil the car before attending the Bahrain tests, and in Bahrain we should really be able to put the car through its paces in representative conditions.”
The decision to miss the Jerez test is a bit surprising, as there are just 12 days of track testing available to the teams before the season gets underway in Australia in mid-March. The major technical regulation changes that have been introduced for this season make every lap important as the teams learn about their new cars and work to make them quicker and more reliable.
It’s possible that Lotus simply need more time to prepare their car before putting it on the track. It’s also possible that they have come up with some interesting solutions to the technical challenges that all teams face in advance of this season. If that is the case, they might want to keep their secrets under wraps until the last possible moment, to prevent other teams from copying their ideas before the season starts.
The Lotus E22 will be raced in 2014 by Romain Grosjean, who has been retained by the team, and Pastor Maldonado, who has moved to Lotus from Williams.
