Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 Team 2013

[Cocles]

More engineering drain from Lotus, unfortunately: Jarrod Murphy, the team’s head of computational fluid dynamics who decided some months ago that he would accept an offer to go to Mercedes GP Petronas - http://joesaward.wordpress.com/2013/09/ ... -mercedes/

Awesome news. I'm assuming he'll be working under Willis who's their current CFD guy?

As a side note, it blows my mind that even Joe Saward can't get the name of the team right. I've made my peace with "MGP", but when you go to the trouble to type it out (and you're a professional F1 journalist)... yeesh. I still see this on occasion, and even FIA.com got it wrong at the beginning of this season, causing Richard to momentarily change the name of the Merc threads.

Sure, typos are typos, and we don't want to be TOO anal, but it's the name of the team for crying out loud. Can you imagine what football/soccer fans would do if you got the name of their team wrong?

[marcush.]

Spending that sort of moneys and coming up with a name for your product too complicated and elaborate to remember or quote correctly is a bit strange ...considering they got around 10 headcount in germany alone occupied with public relations and media presence...
thankfully all the effort on the technical side has led to a commendable upturn in form and added consistency this year.With the new regs for next year we will see how the team has grown and if they are meeting their own targets of being the team to beat...unfortunatelly the dream of achieving this with a lean organisation had to be abandonned but there you go..

[FoxHound]

The lean dream was led by the RRA promise. An empty shell initiative from the FIA.
Look at how costs have not decreased since 2009.

[kooleracer]

Should be recruiting a new chief strategist for next season? Think this the 2nd or 3rd time this season they have dropped the ball during the race with safety car. really poor decision making on the pit wall again. How can you not take a free pitstop effectively when everyone else does. When the decided not the pit immediately knew that they were in trouble....rookie mistake again.....Hope the can secure the 2nd place in constructors this season.

[sidmiester]

Merc's result since spa has not been down to car but their own doing. in spa and monza they didn't get the setup right, in monza particularly their race pace was very impressive. and now singapore, sure ricciardo messed up for mercedes but then i agree, the strategy they took to stay on after safety car was not good decision, they should have pitted one or both cars in!! they effectively gave alonso and raikkonen podium. it could have been merc 2-3 here!

i have to say they haven't been doing good job at the track, the car development is alright. but red bull oh my god, they are just killing the season

[Cocles]

Merc's result since spa has not been down to car but their own doing. in spa and monza they didn't get the setup right, in monza particularly their race pace was very impressive.

I agree about Spa. In Monza, you could blame them for Nico, with something breaking on the car halfway through Practice Session 3, keeping them from finalizing his setup. Hamilton though was blocked by Sutil in qualifying (Sutil penalized), and had a puncture during the race. Granted he also had no radio, which we could blame the team for, but top drivers seem to just shrug that off (or in Kimi's case, prefer it). I think Hamilton could have won Monza if not for Sutil in qualifying.

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On a different note... we're seeing new goals being set by Wolff. Especially interesting, since we can be sure they contain at least a seed of what Stuttgart expects. As was discussed earlier this year, the initial goal Wolff had for 2013 was to reclaim fourth in the constructors championship. Now Wolff states their goal is runner-up for the constructors championship. If they are not constructors champions by 2016, Wolff will consider it a personal failure. Here are the links:

http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/110143

http://www.gpupdate.net/en/f1-news/3008 ... ree-years/

[Juzh]

I think Hamilton could have won Monza if not for Sutil in qualifying.

Or if he'd actually manage to stay on the track during qualifying.

[stefan_]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpRK1v2tezU[/youtube]

[Kiril Varbanov]

Just sharing, let's see:
https://twitter.com/f1enigma/status/387124585897803776

[Hail22]

Just sharing, let's see:

https://twitter.com/f1enigma/status/387124585897803776

If true what do you think? Toto sold his Williams shares to RB? or something else?

[FoxHound]

Wow huge news.....

Reading some news that Brawn is being linked to McLaren and Honda. It's being denied, but these questions where put to Brawn in June.
There is also the fact that the last 3 races Mercedes have tapered off in performance, perhaps Stuttgart want him out before he learns more about the 2014 and 2015 challengers.

Speculation thus far, but all signs indicate Brawn is out by the end of the year at the latest.

Latest is that Mercedes deny anything has been agreed. Discussions are ongoing, for a gradual handover to Paddy Lowe.
The plan from the beginning was for a "soft handover", so I'm guessing Brawn is relinquishing duties day by day and week by week....

[matt21]

There are rumours that Brawn is going to Honda.

[Morteza]

If Brawn leaves for McLaren/Honda, it makes perfect sense to me. McLaren released Lowe earlier than they had announced they would, so there must have been something there to benefit them in doing so. Swapping Lowe for Brawn? Why not?

[Cocles]

Lauda is claiming the rumors aren't true:

http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/110425

[marcush.]

Brawn and Fry made sure potential buyers did not take the bait in 2008 and so Brawn offered to "buy" the lot for the odd 1$ or was it pounds sterling? anyways -Honda had to throw another 100mill into the moneygrave to rid themselves from that disaster making Brawn and Fry rich men .I have no idea why Honda should be hot to get him back on board -save the little fact Brawn won titles with what should have been the 2009 Honda..But as a Honda the diffusser story would have had a different ending ....
I tend to believe Honda is a bit miffed about the ongoings of 2008/2009....