Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 Team 2013

[Gridlock]

1) McLaren announce Honda deal
2) Lowe is cleared to work at MGP

Within a week of each other. Doesn't take much to make the link.

What is interesting to me is the Allison timing in relation when these things would have been agreed, rather than announced. Where oh where is he going..

[Cocles]

Wolff comments on minimal changes to tires...

http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/107543

[yener]

They also hoped and expected that Aldo and Bob would fix the tyre problem. Didnt happen and i don't believe it will hapen now.[/quote]
I honestly bet that the tyre problem is unfixable until next year.

My pet bet is that the engine maps they chose for last year are sub optimal, and that they're bound into them until the new engines appear.[/quote]

Imho i think their approach is wrong. Somehow i have the feeling they are developing a car which is fast over 1 lap. This is a way to build a f1 car before the 2009 rules. Back in the time that was effective, now these days you have to build a car which is overal fast, but you have to put 90% off the effort on race trim.

If you keep trying to build a fast "1lap" car you will never understand where it goed wrong. They dont have a basic.

[Cocles]

http://plus.autosport.com/premium/featu ... n-renault/

First, a heads-up; this article requires an Autosport subscription. If you have one though, this is an incredibly good article discussing how Daimler and Renault have handled their F1 program. The details are fascinating.

[Pierce89]

I don't know. I've seen it reported both ways - either free, or one where I saw it was $10m/yr.

Regardless, I'm surprised if McLaren took money for the deal. Just reading between the lines from interviews, there seems to be a lot of bitterness over Hamilton and Lowe. I don't suppose they'd have negotiated some sort of technical exchange? It seems like both parties would benefit from each others' suspension know-how. Dennis had negotiated something like that with Ferrari before the Stepney thing I remember - it was a "let's work to keep the two of us on top" sort of thing. Wild (and idle) speculation of course.

I'm also surprised that Merc does indeed seem to want Lowe badly. It had seemed to me that Wolf was happily surprised with the staff he found at Merc and so wasn't sure what to do with Lowe. I almost thought that he was regretting his decision to hire him.

According to James Allen it was all about 2014 engines and appeasing Mercedes with regards to Honda learning from their data and designs.

Lowe may not be as celebrated as Newey but he's still a top flight technical director who has built championship winning cars.

Lowe, as a TD,has not built any championship winning cars. He became TD in 2011, when Pat Fry left.

[turbof1]

And built the almighty mp4-27 the year afterwards. So yes he can built championship winning cars (which he hopes will actually win championships at mercedes instead of the team screwing it up).

[Dyanxx]

I don't know. I've seen it reported both ways - either free, or one where I saw it was $10m/yr.

Regardless, I'm surprised if McLaren took money for the deal. Just reading between the lines from interviews, there seems to be a lot of bitterness over Hamilton and Lowe. I don't suppose they'd have negotiated some sort of technical exchange? It seems like both parties would benefit from each others' suspension know-how. Dennis had negotiated something like that with Ferrari before the Stepney thing I remember - it was a "let's work to keep the two of us on top" sort of thing. Wild (and idle) speculation of course.

I'm also surprised that Merc does indeed seem to want Lowe badly. It had seemed to me that Wolf was happily surprised with the staff he found at Merc and so wasn't sure what to do with Lowe. I almost thought that he was regretting his decision to hire him.

According to James Allen it was all about 2014 engines and appeasing Mercedes with regards to Honda learning from their data and designs.

Lowe may not be as celebrated as Newey but he's still a top flight technical director who has built championship winning cars.

Lowe, as a TD,has not built any championship winning cars. He became TD in 2011, when Pat Fry left.

He helped design the quickest car last year, which should've won the WDC and WCC, if it wasn't for Button's inconsistency, and Mclaren's race operations being hilariously bad.

[Richard]

To keep this balanced, he's also responsible for the 28.

[turbof1]

Even Adrian Newey built cars which weren't competitive. It's not a failure of brilliance, but a failure of gettin ideas to work in real life.

However, with so much technical specialists at Mercedes, I have to wonder for what reasons they are doing that. Surely getting them all to work on a car is counter productive. I have a feeling Mercedes is more interested about the strategic implications: buy out the top specialists out of the market, and you leave the opposition bleeding.

[astracrazy]

Paddy Lowe was responsible for designing the 26 to 28 and was obviously involved in previous cars are engineering director

I guess his role, level with Toto i would say? would mean he could be overseeing both cars (directly with 2014 and indirectly with 2013)?

[Pup]

I think his role of late has been more in deciding major directions for design, which projects to pursue, assigning budgets, etc. I doubt if he's put pen to paper in some time.

Of course, what that probably means is that he was responsible for deciding to take the current car in the direction they went, and was at least partly responsible for what they now call "optimistic" interpretations of the design data, so I do think that Richard has a point.

[marcush.]

MGP has gone completely mad with their hiring strategy -you can only say it serves to weaken the competitors ,as it seems completely unplausible you need this much head heavyness to build a racecar with 500 employees.

Who is still out there ? Newey ,FRY,Key,Oatley,Coughlan,Symmonds,Marshall and Smith -maybe Gascoyne...if you resist not to resort to retired greats ...

Compare to the array at MGP :Brawn,Bell,Costa,Willis,Lowe,Allison,have I forgotten someone?..

This was already on the verge of being bizarre considering the original plot was the logic to buy a already shrinked down lean f1 outfit ready for the future...it now looks more like win at all costs

one could argue that knowledge in depth maybe good in MGP but you need senior leaders to tell good from bad directions early on and avoid the lower workforce doing their own thing basically instead of pulling at one rope...The current organigramme does not really cry one direction either but who knows .
My personal view is they have not really been strong in building their team over the years .Against the speech we hear the problems basically have remained as is -tyre use and understanding,strategy and avoiding mistakes eg reliability.
just think of how differently things would have gone without all those silly things going on .

[Pup]

Here are two posts shamelessly copied from the Autosport forums that explain well I think what the TD actually is responsible for. Given McLaren's current, post-Newey organization, I suspect Lowe is much like the Bob Bell type of TD, if not more so. Apologies to the author for swiping his posts...

On Bob Bell and James Allison...

I worked at Enstone from 2006 to the beginning of 2008. At that time James Allison was deputy technical director. His job was basically to help Bob Bell do his tasks.

A 'technical director' in the Bob Bell/Allison mould rarely designs anything. They don't sit in front of a CATIA or Star/CD designing gearboxes or rear wing profiles. The design of the car in those years was supervised by Tim Densham. The aerodynamics of the car was supervised by Dino Toso. The actual design of the car is carried out be junior and senior engineers and its up to the management to decide the which design choices to select and put the whole thing together.

A good way to think of Bob Bell is he's essentially a technical 'buyer'. He has a pocket full of money and his job is to 'make the car go fast'. It's up to him to choose where to allocate these resources. The senior engineering staff will all tell him 'give me $$$'s and I'll get you x seconds a lap'. He has to decide where he thinks the best 'value' for his $$$ is and pursue these avenues of research and development. Of course to do this job you need to have a very good grasp of physics, a good engineering mind, a lot of knowledge and experience in race car performance and you need to be a good listener to get all the information and feedback from your junior staff.

On Newey...

But their role within their company is completely different. My old boss at Ford Australia worked at the McLaren aerodynamics department for five years and got to quite a high level. So he had a good knowledge of how Adrian works.

Adrian is primarily a aerodynamic designer. He still keeps a drawing board in his office and still draws ('schemes') to be sent off to the design office for fabrication. He is still intricately involved in very small aerodynamic details. He still sets at the head of the aerodynamic department and reviews all the CFD data and regular team meetings to not only make management decisions (i.e. which development avenues are a good idea) but also to give himself more input for his own ideas.

It's Adrian's own skill and insight as an aerodynamicist, combined with his experience and knowledge of race car performance, vehicle dynamics, physics etc. that makes him such a formidable package.

Adrian' role of technical director would probably resemble something along the lines of going to the team principal and saying 'give me all your money and I'll make the car go faster'

[astracrazy]

trouble is there is going to be an element of the bigger they are the harder they will fall next year

with all these top guys working there and all the 2014 is our time talk, its fair to say you'd expect some sort of red bull dominance for the next few years (2014 onwards) and anything less must be seen as a failure?

Regarding Pup's post i'd expect PD to take the "Bob Bell role" to

[Shakeman]

MGP has gone completely mad with their hiring strategy -you can only say it serves to weaken the competitors ,as it seems completely unplausible you need this much head heavyness to build a racecar with 500 employees.

Who is still out there ? Newey ,FRY,Key,Oatley,Coughlan,Symmonds,Marshall and Smith -maybe Gascoyne...if you resist not to resort to retired greats ...

Compare to the array at MGP :Brawn,Bell,Costa,Willis,Lowe,Allison,have I forgotten someone?..

This was already on the verge of being bizarre considering the original plot was the logic to buy a already shrinked down lean f1 outfit ready for the future...it now looks more like win at all costs

James Allison at Merc? Have I missed the announcement?

Apparently there are bigger changes in 2015/16 than are immediately obvious according to Brawn and having breadth in depth means several tracks of development.

The Merc team size just shows how important to a car manufacturer it is to be successful particularly when chasing the new rich in the developing markets.