'It can take six months to improve 0.01s'

Force India senior design engineer Dan Marshall has been discussing the process of creating a Formula One car that can compete on the track, and has claimed that it can take up to six months to even make a 0.01 second improvement on the grid.

Speaking to Sportsmail, Marshall's key role involves co-ordinating the aerodynamics of the car, taking it from computer modelling into reality in the most efficient way possible.

The use of computer simulations are used to examine the effects on certain car parts before they are then tested for real in their wind tunnel in Germany, completed nearly 15,000 individual tests per year.

All of this feeds into the painstaking process of marginal gains, and Marshall suggests that patience is requirement when making up even the smallest amount of time.

He said: "The difference in a Formula One grid can be anywhere between one second or two seconds.

"We can spend up to six months developing an item which might give us 0.01 second of a gain. If we spend lots of time doing an upgrade and we're going the wrong direction that can either gain or lose us half a second, that will be the difference being either first, half way down the grid or either last.

"It's basically the small margins we are talking about really!"

Marshall works with one of the smallest budgets in F1 - dwarfed by the likes of Mercedes and Ferrari - and he added that getting around cash flow issues in order to achieve maximum results is challenging, but also drives ingenuity.

He continued: "Being at a small budget team, we have to maximise our efficiency to ensure every test and upgrade we send to the race car is fulfilled to its fulfil potential.

'We can only sometimes send one or two physical components to the track. For example, the front wing. If a driver has a crash on the weekend and destroys a particular front wing, we don't get the performance from that item, or any data, which we need to help with our projects and developments."

Finally, Marshall commented on the controversial introduction of the halo device, and said that the majority of the close season will be spent attempting to counter any aerodynamic issues that the new structure will cause.

He said: "The main regulation change for us is the introduction of the halo driver safety system.

"The Halo will send a different air flow to the rear end of the car. That variation and airflow means we will have to change various parts of the back-end for the car to help cater for that to regain any performance we might have lost."