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ENSTONE PRIDE - MEET JARROD MURPHY

31/08/2011

Here at Enstone, tucked away in the lush green Oxfordshire countryside, we’ve been delving a little deeper to find out more about some of the staff that make Lotus Renault GP what it is.

15years

JARROD MURPHY

HEAD OF COMPUTATIONAL FLUID DYNAMICS (CFD)

Jarrod Murphy’s tall frame leads US through a set of large doors, down a long corridor and into the heart of the LRGP’s Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) department housed in what is essentially a series of large rooms in a bunker-like building built into a hill behind the main Enstone factory. Like everywhere else at Enstone, the place is spotless, but here especially so. The facility is so new the floors shine.

JARROD has been with the team since 1996, his first job in F1. Recruited straight out of university he spent three years in the stress department before moving into CFD:

“We have one of the strongest CFD facilities in F1,” states Murphy proudly, punching in a security access code and showing the ‘cluster’ - huge banks of computers running millions of computational simulations simultaneously, and noisily, it has to be said. “That’s the noise of the fans because the cluster is running 24/7 evaluating many different ideas, and concepts. Usually new ideas start off in CFD before putting them into the wind tunnel to get some tunnel data. We’re getting data constantly. It’s the rate at which we find them that’s crucial. All of the teams are improving their cars all the time, no team is standing still, so our job is to find them at a quicker rate than the other teams.”

Murphy admits his team is motivated to do better, and be better, than other teams. To see the car move up the grid by developing it more quickly and, he stresses, faster than the other teams are developing their cars. This success lies in managing the working process efficiently:

“The more efficient we are, the more ideas we can get through the cluster. This increases our hit-rate which translates directly to better performance on the track. Engineers like solving problems and the problem is trying to generate more downforce within the rules that you’re given. The ultimate gauge of our department’s performance is the amount of downforce we put on the car, so it’s a clear indicator of how good a job we’re doing.”

Credit: Lotus Renault GP (www.lotusrenaultgp.com)