Following the signature of the commercial agreement with FOM this week by Mercedes-Benz, the Mercedes AMG Petronas Formula One Team is pleased to announce that Lewis Hamilton has signed a three-year agreement to race for the team from the 2013 Formula One season.
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marcush. wrote:you are dreaming if you think a drivers voice would have any influence on upgrade scheduling .
These things need to be well thought out and preplanned =scheduled you cannot just come up with an idea and stick it to the car trying to improve.
You are working on the new prject and deadlines will fix the point when you will have to set a design freeze for your lunch spec ,first ,second third race specification.
The on track experience will obviously redirect your development plans as certainly not everything is working as intended or thing s do not work at all....but certainly an upgrade will rarely be triggered n´by a driver stomping angry in the workshop.
Yeah that is more likely the case, but in real life there are a few exceptions.... Hamilton pushed Mclaren into releasing the side wash endplates a race early in 2009. He even suggested that they put a certain feature on the wing. So you can say he had a small hand in its design. It is well documented actually.
A more recent example would be vettel, who didn't like an update to the back end of the car, at china. At Bahrain, Red Bull incorporated features of the old back end into the new one, at Vettel's demand.
Last edited by turbof1 on 10 Sep 2012, 20:41, edited 1 time in total.
n smikle wrote:Yeah that is more likely the case, but in real life there are a few exceptions.... Hamilton pushed Mclaren into releasing the side wash endplates a race early in 2009.
turbof1 wrote:A more recent example would be vettel, who at the beginning of the season didn't like an update to the back end of the car. Ultimately, Red Bull incorporated features of the old back end into the new one, at Vettel's demand.
I have never heard of either event happening. Do you folks have a source for both?
bhallg2k wrote:How is he being treated like a child at McLaren? Children are coddled.
Some strict parents beleive children shoulde seen but not heard. And it is also widely held that Children should not be told the truth in certain situations.
He started as a child in the team and he will never be seen as a man.
turbof1 wrote:A more recent example would be vettel, who at the beginning of the season didn't like an update to the back end of the car. Ultimately, Red Bull incorporated features of the old back end into the new one, at Vettel's demand.
I have never heard of either event happening. Do you folks have a source for both?
It is not really mentioned in there that the Bahrain spec back end included features of an older version; I can't remember where I readed that, so you'll have to take that a bit for granted :p.
the Bahrain spec RB8 sidepod closed off the small duct that they had (before it was successfully reintroduced in Valencia) - but I have never heard it to be a Vettel suggestion.
n smikle wrote:He even suggested that they put a certain feature on the wing. So you can say he had a small hand in its design. It is well documented actually.
Can you point me to where Hamilton had the "small hand" in it's design? Or merely whether he pushed the team into adding a design that was already in the pipeline? There is a huge difference.
n smikle wrote:He started as a child in the team and he will never be seen as a man.
Yet they pay him 1000 times better than the average man?
n smikle wrote:He even suggested that they put a certain feature on the wing. So you can say he had a small hand in its design. It is well documented actually.
Can you point me to where Hamilton had the "small hand" in it's design? Or merely whether he pushed the team into adding a design that was already in the pipeline? There is a huge difference.
“I spend a lot of time with my aerodynamicists, questioning them, and I’m sure they look at me and go, ‘He’s just a driver, what’s he talking about?’” smiles Lewis. “But I have a proven understanding of the engineering of my car. This year, I was responsible for one of the upgrades that brought us three points of downforce in Spa. We didn’t really perform that weekend, but it stayed on the carfor the rest of the year and it helped. It was something I forced and got put on the car, and it was better, and it was great. You know, I was going to put my signature on it...”
And regarding the 2010 car he says a few interesting this but this jumps off the page:
“I can get away with asking the questions because I am the driver. With some things they’ll say, ‘Actually, your right,’ and I’ve got to continue doing that. I really feel I’m having more input into my car than others are in their car in other teams.”
Here you go.
BTW check out the last sentence... this article is from 2009.. we know that laste sentence became null and void after a certain Jenson Button entered the team...
The closest thing I can remember of Hamilton nearly designing a part, off the top of my head, was actually this year. He was sat in the car during the seat fit, then they gave him a model wing mirror mounted on a flexible stalk (for modelling purposes). He adjusted the mirrors until he was happy with what he could see through them on either side.
The engineers apparently were reluctant to do the design because they thought it would be bad for the aero, but Lewis pushed for the upgrade to be tested, and apparently they were aero neutral.
Mind you this was all in Lewis' own words.
I don't consider pushing the team to test each design as "designing" something. Lewis would have to produce some physical form of a design sculpture or drawing to hand over to the development teams for it to count as "design," in my book. Having said that, looking back at the context in which you were actually replying to marcush - as to whether or not a driver could push for upgrades to be brought forward, then yes, it's fully applicable (as an anecdotal counterexample to marcush's point)
I don´t want to dwell on about wing mirrors .My point was a little bit different if you want to find a leg of a fly to proove i´m wrong so be it.
The point was a driver is driving the car not pushing for certain technical designs he is giving feedback about car behaviour and the engineers develop parts and systems to help him do a better job.If he needs more mirror he has more of a say but he can stomp all day long asking for a third wing flap but still will not get his way.
It takes years of a talented guy's life to get into an F1 team and even more to actually make a discernible difference. There are ever more growing murmurings of Hamilton's reputation from within the team, and with the stories you quoted NSmikle, it is easy to see why this is the case if true.
I'm in the "Hamilton is a great driver" camp. But it does not help his cause with engineers, by taking credit for "designing an upgrade". It sounds ridiculous.
Can you for one minute imagine a company as serious as McLaren letting Hamilton "have a go" at designing an aspect of front wing?
FoxHound wrote:
I'm in the "Hamilton is a great driver" camp. But it does not help his cause with engineers, by taking credit for "designing an upgrade". It sounds ridiculous.
If Rosberg made such a claim, I'd believe it moreso than if Hamilton said it (at least that guy held an offer for Aero at Imperial ).
This is beginning to sound an awful lot like Alonso's 'six tenths'.......
McLaren have already made their decision, and it would have been nailed down after that farcical publication of sacrosanct, confidential data which was almost certainly a breach of his contract.
).