Mercedes AMG F1 W03

[illario]

There is another angle of the 'thing' of mercedes.

[Med4224]

Schumacher said that the situation with the tyres was better last weekend than in Melbourne. dbwmhn's analysis of lap times seems to agree with this, at least in the dry.

However, Rosberg and Schumi, but especially Rosberg, had an awful time on the inters. This could be explained by two things:

1) Mercedes rain setup is not optimal (possibly a lower ride height than the others, as they were hoping for a mostly dry race), leading to sliding around in the wet, leading to degradation of the tyres

2) Mercedes have not understood how to use the wet and intermediate tyres properly.

Both of these possibilities being reinforced by the fact that Mercedes performed very little testing in wet conditions.

The thing is, Michael, Rosberg, and more importantly Brawn didn't blame it on any of these things after the race. They clearly stated "tyre degradation". And that this problem is almost the solitary issue they will invest their time in till next race.

[JohnsonsEvilTwin]

Im afraid thats not true Med.

http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/98407

In this piece Rosberg even goes on to say this:

the first inters I had to come into the pits because I thought my rear tyre was game over completely. So I come into the pits, put a new set of inters on and the pit crew said to me that my inters were brand new still, so I thought, what is going on? They felt completely destroyed. It was strange.

[Med4224]

Michael: "It's clear from today that there is still a lot of work for us to do to take our pace from qualifying into the race, and I am sure the guys are already thinking very hard about finding a solution. But this will not be done from one race to another, it will take some time, and we need to give it that time. "

Rosberg: " But then I had problems with my intermediate tyres; the degradation was very high which forced me to do another pit stop for a new set"

Brawn: "Clearly we have a conundrum with this car that we have to unravel. After such an encouraging qualifying session, and indeed the fuel runs that we did on Friday, we struggled to get the tyres to work properly in the race today. There were little windows when we seemed to get them working and other times where we fell out of them completely. I don't believe that we are abusing the tyres, just not using them properly, and it's a problem that we have to solve if we are going to move forward with the car."

These same quotes can work for 2010 and 2011...
They made a quick car, except when it has to use tyres

Honda GP = irony at its best

This is from yesterday

Rosberg said degradation in the quote, and also on post race interview with RTL
Michael didn't talk about the tyres

Brawn talked about their window of operation

If their problem is not getting the tyres into their sweet spot
that is fixable within the season... which seems to be Brawn's sentiment

But if Rosberg meant degradation as in last year...that doesnt seem to be an easy fix

[munudeges]

Very odd indeed. This car has a very strange problem. Perhaps the F-duct is altering the balance of the car in qualifying that is hurting them in the race in a way no one thought possible?

[Ferraripilot]

I would hold off all judgment on W03 until the team can honestly say they yielded the maximum the car is capable of during a race. We have clearly not seen that as the team have had tire problems both races which has left the drivers and team disgruntled with this girthy issue they need to sort through. I'm sure it's very fixable, but there's no point in judging what is essentially a broken car during the race. And don't anyone fool yourselves in believing the super-DRS system yields more than .200-.300 during qualifying at best. It's good, but it's not that massively good.

[skgoa]

I don't think we should be listening to Rosberg right now. He whined about balance issues in Melbourne (Schumacher had no problems) and clearly misjudged tyre wear on inters.

Let's take a look at lap times, shall we?
On full wets, Schumacher was one of the strongest, clearly outperforming e.g. Hamilton. As soon as he switched to dry-weather tyres, he was on the pace or only a few tens off. Rosberg was slightly worse but his performance was not abysmal.
This means the fundamental pace was there. The car clearly had a problem getting the inters to work.* Tyre deg is to high but the car that is much worse to its tyres (having to pit 2 laps earlier in Melbourne) won this race.


* Actually, since we didn't see the cars that much in the broadcast, we don't know wether or not they were stuck behind mid-fielders, unable to overtake in these conditions. I am not saying everything is fine at Merc but the have not seen an incident-free race, yet. The basic pace is there.

[Ferraripilot]

Technical please. Mestrades, please explain to us the technical issue of the car and how it relates to their race issue, and then explain in another section why you are judging a broken car? Makes no sense when we have not seen the car perform to what it's capable of due to a basic suspension issue.


Tire rubber is a fickle thing when it's not up to operating range. It drastically loses grip, and falls apart laterally. I suspect Rosberg experienced this more than Schu did last weekend. The question is, what is the plan of action to get more heat.

I believe they need to increase the load the tires are taking, specifically the rears. They have a very soft front end but I don't believe the issue is at the front. Tighten the back end further and yet retain the same length of suspension travel. Geometry changes at the back coming by Europe or even China is my guess. When in a heavy turning situation, I believe best tire grip is achieved by the more loaded tire (if turning right, the back left tire) having around 1 deg negative camber so they could also possibly set the car to an an neutral position on the rears and shorten travel a bit.

[pocketmoon]

With all the discussion about laptimes I highly recommend the interactive laptime charts over at F1Fanatic.co.uk

I can't post pics from work but it shows that Schumi has been much more consistent than Nico at both races. Schumi's laptimes have a linear improvement (as the car lightens) while Nico starts out ok and then has a drop off "hump".

I think we would be looking at Shumi as having a good start to the season if it had not been for his bad luck at both races.

Really odd than Nico says he came in expecting dead inters only to be told they looked new! I think they need to have a word with the guy that inflates the tyres

Rob

[elf341]

Ross Brawn in the post-race interview was adamant that they were not abusing the tyres, and Rosberg talked about his pit-crew's surprise at Rosberg's old inters being "brand new still", whilst they "felt completely destroyed".

So that's two pieces of evidence that seem to me not to point to tyre degradation issues, but instead to the W03 being unable to "switch on" the tyres. This is reminiscent of Ferrari's 2011 problems with the Hard tyre, where they had warm up issues - being too delicate on the tyres.

This is a fundamentally different problem to the W02, which was shredding its tyres as though they were made out of cheese. And so, it does seem that perhaps Mercedes - in its efforts to get on top of its tyre issues from last year - have swung too far the other way and cannot get the required heat into the tyres for them to provide the optimal grip. Ross Brawn himself alluded to this philosophy pre-season when he talked about the benefits of the 2011 EBD being precision funneling of gases to avoid overheating the tyres, critiquing some more aggressive rival 2012 solutions as potentially cooking the tyres - this view may have been sent them down the conservative route with not wanting to disturb the tyres at all.

Having a narrow operating window for a component is the bane of any engineer. They must have a serious error in their tyre modelling, as it's fairly standard practice for model engineers to intentionally design-in robust operating surfaces for critical parameters, so that parameter specification error has minimal impact on model accuracy.

[ak21_rao]

The W03 is not at all a front running or race winning car. All the speed it has during qualifying is courtsy the DRSactivated F Duct. In race the device is simply not used and hence the car is slow. What a wasteful innovation which can be used only in qualifying...wat was brawn thinking. The car carries 2 pipes running through its length to be used only in qualifying.....wat were they doing all the winter. i agree the front wing is good and car handles much better...but from where will the race pace come? why r they so conservative with the exhaust? in F1 innovation counts. that too efective innovation.

[siskue2005]

The W03 is not at all a front running or race winning car. All the speed it has during qualifying is courtsy the DRSactivated F Duct. In race the device is simply not used and hence the car is slow. What a wasteful innovation which can be used only in qualifying...wat was brawn thinking. The car carries 2 pipes running through its length to be used only in qualifying.....wat were they doing all the winter. i agree the front wing is good and car handles much better...but from where will the race pace come? why r they so conservative with the exhaust? in F1 innovation counts. that too efective innovation.

I do not agree with it
If it was just DRS they should be like 8 to 10 km faster in quly like Mclaren in 2010
But instead they are just 2 kmph faster than other cars

and in race they are almost on par with other cars

Speed trap in Australia quly
http://www.formula1.com/results/season/ ... _trap.html
They are even slower than Lewis

[Maelstrom]

The W03 is not at all a front running or race winning car. All the speed it has during qualifying is courtsy the DRSactivated F Duct. In race the device is simply not used and hence the car is slow. What a wasteful innovation which can be used only in qualifying...wat was brawn thinking. The car carries 2 pipes running through its length to be used only in qualifying.....wat were they doing all the winter. i agree the front wing is good and car handles much better...but from where will the race pace come? why r they so conservative with the exhaust? in F1 innovation counts. that too efective innovation.

The F-Duct according to what I have read gives it .200 or .300 of a second advantage at most. So I wouldn't say the Mercedes is a slow car. It's just not got race pace. Most of this is pointing to the tyres. But I may be wrong.

[Mestrades]

It is impossible to provide technical solutions to a problem that knocked out a whole team like Ferrari last year. If you do not want it to recognize is your problem, but the car this year is clearly a step backward, not forward.

[ak21_rao]

the drs f duct gives just 2-3 kmph advantage when compared to others because speed is measured at the end of the straight. if you observe carefully the f duct helps the car achieve speed quickly by reducing drag but at the end of the straight to stbalize the car under braking , the drs has to be deactivated a second or two earlier in the w03 compared to the other cars. iam referring it as a slow car because i haven't seen a fast laptime in that car wihout the drs. you can compare the fastest lap times in the both races and see where this car stands.