In this blogpost, I'll do a walkaround some of the details of the 1994 car. Buried away in the Ligier museum, there are a few good detail shots of the car on my usual resource site http://www.gurneyflap.com/ligiermuseum.html
Ligier ran quite a small front wing endplate at the beginning of the season, but upgraded to quite a big endplate for the end of the season. I've put the wireframe on so that you can see there is quite bump half way down the endplate, I'm not quite sure why. The under side on the leading edge curves outwards, before directing the air to the inside of the front wheels on the trailing edge. So it's not quite as straight forward as I had initially thought, but I'm always pleased to add the detail onto my 3D model. The front wing is pretty basic, the main plane is raised in the centre section, a smoother version of their 1993 concept. The two white dots on the nose I'm not sure what they were for exactly, but again it's always nice to add a few details on when I spot them.
The nose itself is an interesting shape and one where my version differs from my resources. The flat side does not go all the way to the tip of the nose, instead it is rounded for half the width of the front wing. It also sits higher than the early season resource models I've been referring to, and is actually not too dissimilar in height from the 1993 car which was slightly raised. I also added a hole at the trailing edge of the nose cone for the steering arm as per the real car.
The front suspension is actually lifted from the 1994 Williams, just amended in position to fit this car. The brake duct is new, although I could not find any good shots of the brake ducts from the late season car, but I put on quite a generic one. The mounting points are different from the Williams, but quite straight forward on this car. For the front lower wishbone, I had to cut out a section of the monocoque, again in a similar way to the Williams. It's not very clear on this screenshot, but I've put quite a bit of detail into the section underneath the nose.
Ligier run a double pitot tube, one directly behind the other. The team added bargeboards mid-season, it's quite a simple rectangular shape, though it has a bit cut off for the suspension arm to pass through. There are also a couple of bumps on the monocoque to factor in, the one above the diagonal suspension arm, which I had to put a hole in as well, and there are two small bumps on top of the monocoque, in between the pitot tube and the aerial. For me, it's quite a fun challenge to get the normals working well with the flat side of the monocoque and the curved section along the top, which dissipates as you get towards the opening of the sidepod and the cockpit. You can see the curved bodyline at the sidepod opening which wasn't easy to get right. Actually, I departed from my normal method of doing body lines, simple having detached indents to save time and actually is slightly more effective.
The mirrors sit quite low on the Ligier, but when I modelled the rear wing elements, I realised it had a very small gap to see through. The Ligier had quite a large and rounded cockpit opening, particularly along the sides. It means much more of the driver body (taken from my 1995 Ferrari) and the seat is exposed. The dash and steering wheel mounts are all covered by the top of the monocoque, and though the rules threated to change this arrangement (in accidents heads were hitting the front of the cockpit), it didn't get fully implemented until 1995 (as far as I can tell). From the photos that I have, there was simply just a screen, or for the museum car most of the cockpit had been stripped. Other cars have done a generic dashboard model, but I've decided to follow the pictures and just have a small rectangular screen and one button for the fire extinguisher. The visor (coloured in black here) is also an upside down L shape, which has been a feature of Ligier cars in the early 90s.
