2019 Mercedes AMG Petronas Formula One Team

[GPR-A]

All the focus on front wings and the Mercedes being slow rhetoric coming from the media absolutely benefits the media. It's going to generate more clicks and views if the article and headline says Mercedes is slow and Ferrari is fast because a lot of people are tired of Mercedes winning everything, even if they are seemingly doing it was class.

Regarding the testing performance - I think the temperatures could have been playing a bigger role than we think. On the harder tyres the car put down some very quick times, in line with Ferrari and their long run pace was once again incredibly quick and consistent.

The long run pace of the Merc was not quick at all during testing last week. Last year both in Winter Testing and during the GP, Mercedes was lapping in the 1:19-1:21 range for 90% of the race (1:22s at the verystart of the race), whereas they lapped on average 1-1.5s/lap slower on their "race sims" last week.

Apples to Apples comparison. Winter Testing Race Sim 2018 Vs Winter Testing Race Sim 2019. You already have the numbers from 2019, so I am posting 2018 winter testing numbers (second test).

[dans79]

The long run pace of the Merc was not quick at all during testing last week. Last year both in Winter Testing and during the GP, Mercedes was lapping in the 1:19-1:21 range for 90% of the race (1:22s at the verystart of the race), whereas they lapped on average 1-1.5s/lap slower on their "race sims" last week.

You don't compare times from one year to the next. You compare times between the teams, preferably on the same day if you can.

[GPR-A]

With the kind of budgets and resources available in the top 3 teams, understanding various flow structures and choosing the most performant aero philosophy isn't such a big deal. All of these teams possess people of high caliber and experts in CFD and Wind Tunnel simulations and if one remembers correctly, James Allison said, the design for W10 started in the last few months of 2017. They would have played around with different front wing concepts before choosing the most optimum concept to then develop on.

They have spent around 14 months to bring the car to the current shape and that would mean something. Knowing each others' potential to develop cars, each of them would have set themselves with highly ambitious targets to achieve with this year's car and as 2018 progressed, they most likely kept bringing in ideas from the 2018 cars. It would beneficial to keep the fundamental philosophy unchanged while developing the new car as the learning from the 2018 car can be applied for 2019 car. It would be rare in the modern times to change drastically change the philosophy like McLaren did in 2013 or the way Ferrari did for 2017. One was a disaster and the other one was a work of genius. But the safer option is to evolve the philosophies like Red Bull and Mercedes have been doing.

The one critical characteristic for which the real race track time is required, is to measure the handling of the car (kinematics). Especially as the tyre construction keeps changing every year, the balance of the car depends fundamentally on the behavior of the tyres and that is something the teams haven't matured yet to simulate without a track test. All the work they do at the end of a season to learn about the tyres for next season, gives them theoretical idea of tyre behavior. But they would only figure out when they come to winter testing.

While Red Bull and Ferrari have minimal trouble with these aspects, Mercedes has always had challenges on this aspect and they take time to correlate the actual tyre behavior. While gaining aero efficiency hasn't been a problem for Mercedes, it's always the mechanical behavior of the car in relation to tyre, is where they have struggled. They always know that, whatever aero philosophy they follow, they produce fundamentally strong car. Once they start understanding the car's behavior with tyres, they start bringing in fixes that would enable that fundamentally strong car to then come into it's own.

Last year they got 2 poles and 2 wins in the first 7 races (lucky in Baku)! For the next 2 third of the season, their car was exceptional, also aided with some driver errors from the competitors. So, it's not an uncommon situation for Mercedes.

I would wait for the second test to complete, before making up any kind of opinion. At the end of 4th day of the first test, when Sky F1 team was interviewing Esteban Ocon, they asked him how does he compare the car to Ferrari. He clearly said, they cannot compare it at the moment and he repeated it after being asked one more time.

[Sierra117]

With the kind of budgets and resources available in the top 3 teams, understanding various flow structures and choosing the most performant aero philosophy isn't such a big deal. All of these teams possess people of high caliber and experts in CFD and Wind Tunnel simulations and if one remembers correctly, James Allison said, the design for W10 started in the last few months of 2017. They would have played around with different front wing concepts before choosing the most optimum concept to then develop on.

They have spent around 14 months to bring the car to the current shape and that would mean something. Knowing each others' potential to develop cars, each of them would have set themselves with highly ambitious targets to achieve with this year's car and as 2018 progressed, they most likely kept bringing in ideas from the 2018 cars. It would beneficial to keep the fundamental philosophy unchanged while developing the new car as the learning from the 2018 car can be applied for 2019 car. It would be rare in the modern times to change drastically change the philosophy like McLaren did in 2013 or the way Ferrari did for 2017. One was a disaster and the other one was a work of genius. But the safer option is to evolve the philosophies like Red Bull and Mercedes have been doing.

The one critical characteristic for which the real race track time is required, is to measure the handling of the car (kinematics). Especially as the tyre construction keeps changing every year, the balance of the car depends fundamentally on the behavior of the tyres and that is something the teams haven't matured yet to simulate without a track test. All the work they do at the end of a season to learn about the tyres for next season, gives them theoretical idea of tyre behavior. But they would only figure out when they come to winter testing.

While Red Bull and Ferrari have minimal trouble with these aspects, Mercedes has always had challenges on this aspect and they take time to correlate the actual tyre behavior. While gaining aero efficiency hasn't been a problem for Mercedes, it's always the mechanical behavior of the car in relation to tyre, is where they have struggled. They always know that, whatever aero philosophy they follow, they produce fundamentally strong car. Once they start understanding the car's behavior with tyres, they start bringing in fixes that would enable that fundamentally strong car to then come into it's own.

Last year they got 2 poles and 2 wins in the first 7 races (lucky in Baku)! For the next 2 third of the season, their car was exceptional, also aided with some driver errors from the competitors. So, it's not an uncommon situation for Mercedes.

I would wait for the second test to complete, before making up any kind of opinion. At the end of 4th day of the first test, when Sky F1 team was interviewing Esteban Ocon, they asked him how does he compare the car to Ferrari. He clearly said, they cannot compare it at the moment and he repeated it after being asked one more time.

Very well put.

What do you think might be the reason behind Merc finding it hard year after year when it comes to understanding tyres and/or general mechanical handling? It's not like Merc doesn't have experience building racing cars outside of F1. Afterall they built some of the most brilliant cars (ahh CLK GTR <3)

[mkay]

The long run pace of the Merc was not quick at all during testing last week. Last year both in Winter Testing and during the GP, Mercedes was lapping in the 1:19-1:21 range for 90% of the race (1:22s at the verystart of the race), whereas they lapped on average 1-1.5s/lap slower on their "race sims" last week.

You don't compare times from one year to the next. You compare times between the teams, preferably on the same day if you can.

Nobody else, AFAIK, has done these kinds of stints, though so there's no comparison to be had across (leading) teams.

[GPR-A]

Very well put.

What do you think might be the reason behind Merc finding it hard year after year when it comes to understanding tyres and/or general mechanical handling? It's not like Merc doesn't have experience building racing cars outside of F1. Afterall they built some of the most brilliant cars (ahh CLK GTR <3)

Thanks. I can only guess (not an expert and have very limited understanding) and my take is, the low rake that they run with, doesn't allow much of a room for the suspension to be flexible for setup changes. I remember reading once in 2017, when Lewis had mentioned that, it hurts his bu** as the suspension was so rigid and they had to bear the hits on bumpy parts of the track.

While the low rake helps them in some parts as in, they don't want to manage the unnecessary ride height changes that the relative high rake brings, where you need the rear to sit down on straights and come up in corner entry, but again go down at the corner exit. That whole process seems like more disturbing to the aerodynamic balance of the car and Mercedes prefers the steady state for both entry and exit. But that high rake philosophy helps in suspension movement absorbing the aero load and not transfer it completely on to the wheels, which relatively puts lesser loads into the tyres. But the Mercedes philosophy of low rake, forces the suspension to become relatively rigid (as it cannot squat too much) and the resulting aero load in the corners, cooks their tyres as suspension isn't absorbing it. Hence, they have to look at ideas to remove the heat from tyres quickly (new rims), rather than creating solutions to put less heat in them. That is why, their cars relish the harder compounds which they can keep alive with higher temperatures and struggle with softest range.

The fact that, Pirelli keeps changing their construction almost every year, disturbs Mercedes' solutions, which are very specifically developed for a particular type of compound. It seems like Mercedes designers prefers a good steady state aero performance as the primary objective and tyre life as secondary. Most likely they believe that, that sort of aero philosophy is critical for performance on circuits that have fast, flowing corners with decently long straights. Most tracks on the calendar feature those characteristics and if you observe, the Mercedes cars excels in Bahrain, Spain, Britain, Spa, Japan and US to name a few. Whenever the Mercedes cars blends with the tyres, they dominate. WIth them making progress on slow corner performance (Singapore last year), they should be good be good for most tracks on the calendar.

This year, not just that Pirelli has introduced new tyres, the new regulations should have also changed the overall behavior of the car. So, it's not hard to understand why they would go fight the ghosts of past experiences again.

[Sierra117]

Very well put.

What do you think might be the reason behind Merc finding it hard year after year when it comes to understanding tyres and/or general mechanical handling? It's not like Merc doesn't have experience building racing cars outside of F1. Afterall they built some of the most brilliant cars (ahh CLK GTR <3)

Thanks. I can only guess (not an expert and have very limited understanding) and my take is, the low rake that they run with, doesn't allow much of a room for the suspension to be flexible for setup changes. I remember reading once in 2017, when Lewis had mentioned that, it hurts his bu** as the suspension was so rigid and they had to bear the hits on bumpy parts of the track.

While the low rake helps them in some parts as in, they don't want to manage the unnecessary ride height changes that the relative high rake brings, where you need the rear to sit down on straights and come up in corner entry, but again go down at the corner exit. That whole process seems like more disturbing to the aerodynamic balance of the car and Mercedes prefers the steady state for both entry and exit. But that high rake philosophy helps in suspension movement absorbing the aero load and not transfer it completely on to the wheels, which relatively puts lesser loads into the tyres. But the Mercedes philosophy of low rake, forces the suspension to become relatively rigid (as it cannot squat too much) and the resulting aero load in the corners, cooks their tyres as suspension isn't absorbing it. Hence, they have to look at ideas to remove the heat from tyres quickly (new rims), rather than creating solutions to put less heat in them. That is why, their cars relish the harder compounds which they can keep alive with higher temperatures and struggle with softest range.

The fact that, Pirelli keeps changing their construction almost every year, disturbs Mercedes' solutions, which are very specifically developed for a particular type of compound. It seems like Mercedes designers prefers a good steady state aero performance as the primary objective and tyre life as secondary. Most likely they believe that, that sort of aero philosophy is critical for performance on circuits that have fast, flowing corners with decently long straights. Most tracks on the calendar feature those characteristics and if you observe, the Mercedes cars excels in Bahrain, Spain, Britain, Spa, Japan and US to name a few. Whenever the Mercedes cars blends with the tyres, they dominate. WIth them making progress on slow corner performance (Singapore last year), they should be good be good for most tracks on the calendar.

This year, not just that Pirelli has introduced new tyres, the new regulations should have also changed the overall behavior of the car. So, it's not hard to understand why they would go fight the ghosts of past experiences again.

Right. It's quite easy to fall into the trap of just switching to more rake, but I feel like there is a lot less you can do about aero than you can about something mechanical. Like they made use of the rims to deal with the heat for Singapore-like circuits, they can play around with suspension and strust and arms and all that. But for aero, the increase in rake means a whole lot of unknowns as you're dealing with mostly free-flowing fluid (air) and the rake would significantly alter the whole body of the car. So it makes sense why they've stuck to prioritising stable, consistent aero and it's worked great on most of the circuits.

[pantherxxx]

What's the point of building a B spec car? I think it means that they had massive problems with their A spec, so they had to bring these rushed out updates. Reminds me of Mclaren last year.

Hahaha - this has to be the most moronic post on this entire forum

You don't support your opinion with arguments. My assumption was based on the fact that last year the same thing happened with Mclaren. They built a spec A chassis which wasn't fast enough, and soon the B spec came into the picture. This may mean that development has gone in the wrong direction, which they could have noticed in January. Of course, AMUS says that it's just a basic package which was necessary for further development, but I'm still skeptical. I'm not buying the "Mercedes needed more time in the wind tunnel" story. And before you say it is just speculation, the truth is that everything is just speculation here.

[Morteza]

Mercedes start the second week of testing with a new aero package

Mercedes brought an updated bodywork kit to the second and final week of pre-season testing in Barcelona. The team’s programme for the day focused on the initial set-up work and developing an understanding of the new aero package; however, owing to an oil-pressure issue in the early afternoon, the team decided to swap the Power Unit which limited Valtteri’s time behind the wheel.

- Lewis drove the car in the morning, gathering data on the new aero package as well as working on the set-up of the car

- Valtteri got a first feel of the W10 with the updated bodywork in the afternoon; however, his programme was limited owing to an oil pressure issue

- Mercedes-Benz Power Units completed a total of 1355 km today

Lewis Hamilton
"It’s been a beautiful day here in Barcelona and it was great to see that even more fans turned out today. We got through our run programme and the car was feeling relatively good. It was an improvement from last week which is a good step. The tyres are also working a better now that the track temperature is a bit higher. We have to continue to analyse everything and keep pushing."

Valtteri Bottas
"Unfortunately, after four days of flawless reliability last week, I spent most of the day waiting as we had an oil pressure issue on my first outlap and had to change the Power Unit. But I’m glad I still got to do a few laps, the team did a really good job to get the car out again; it was important to get a bit of a feel for the new aero package. My running was obviously very limited, but it seems like we’ve made improvements. We need to review everything in more detail tonight and I’m looking forward to continuing our programme tomorrow morning."


James Allison
"It was not exactly the day we hoped for, running for the first time with the bodywork kit that we expect to use in Melbourne, with a large part of the day lost to an oil pressure issue at lunchtime. Nevertheless, either side of that problem we did do some useful things, finding that the car behaves a little differently with the new package. We’re looking forward very much to have a trouble-free day tomorrow to get a better feel for what it can do."

[roon]

Autosport commentary on the update package

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHJ07PQJRFM

5 minutes of my life I won't get back. That video is a waste of time, to be honest. You'll get more from reading posts on here.

Not having a go at you, by the way, just the Autosport stuff these days is pretty hand-wavy guff mostly.

There is an interesting nugget in that video where they state that there are in the region of 1500 components in the update which I think settles the debate as to whether this was planned or panic driven.

I wonder what other teams think when Mercedes shows up to testing with 1500 new parts to test.

They take updates to a new level. The past couple years they've been doing this. Uniquely.

[GPR-A]

High Rake or Low Rake? James Allison has an answer.

https://www.autosport.com/f1/feature/88 ... des-crisis

As James Allison said late last year, things that are visible always draw the attention.

"Rake is like noses, everyone talks about them because you can see them," said Allison, whose 2018 car ran slightly increased rake compared to '17 and has apparently carried over roughly that level to this year.

"It's crept up during the year, but we're clearly not tail up, nose down and in all likelihood you can make a competitive car high or low rake. For us to say as an article of faith that high rake is the way to go, you'd spend a lot of time wading around below your current level of performance before you found all the tricks necessary to get back where you are today.

"I suspect someone with high rake might look at our car and wonder if there's more value in low rake. It's just a question of developing what you have. I guess if God were designing the car he'd be able to tell us but I doubt whether anyone else knows!"

[Sierra117]

Man I love James Allison. He's like the Dumbledore of the real world. Anybody else read his posts in his voice?

He's right though. There's no black and white just how you manage and package around your chosen rake.

[Juzh]

While Red Bull and Ferrari have minimal trouble with these aspects, Mercedes has always had challenges on this aspect and they take time to correlate the actual tyre behavior. While gaining aero efficiency hasn't been a problem for Mercedes, it's always the mechanical behavior of the car in relation to tyre, is where they have struggled.

Ferrari had their own share of tyre related problems. Remember some races last year where they were munching them up for breakfast while not being all that fast in return. Red bull imo is the only team that we can say for certain is the best on tires year after year and generally do not suffer, or suffer the least, with any type of serious graining or degradation problems when it matters.

[gibells]

...With the kind of budgets and resources available in the top 3 teams, understanding various flow structures and choosing the most performant aero philosophy isn't such a big deal. All of these teams possess people of high caliber and experts in CFD and Wind Tunnel simulations and if one remembers correctly, James Allison said, the design for W10 started in the last few months of 2017. They would have played around with different front wing concepts before choosing the most optimum concept to then develop on.
...

Great post mate. And I find it astounding that the press still think this 'Melbourne Spec' is reactionary from the first test. Anyway, to expand from the points you put, isn't correlation between the CFD, Wind Tunnel and Actual an important part of the foundation for developing a car? And therefore, could it be that putting a wacky front wing (or aero concept) on for the first week (while carrying out system checks etc), and seeing how that behaves, and then putting your always intended aero concept on in the second week. Would that improve verification of the correlation between CFD, Wind Tunnel and Actual?

[Sierra117]

While Red Bull and Ferrari have minimal trouble with these aspects, Mercedes has always had challenges on this aspect and they take time to correlate the actual tyre behavior. While gaining aero efficiency hasn't been a problem for Mercedes, it's always the mechanical behavior of the car in relation to tyre, is where they have struggled.

Ferrari had their own share of tyre related problems. Remember some races last year where they were munching them up for breakfast while not being all that fast in return. Red bull imo is the only team that we can say for certain is the best on tires year after year and generally do not suffer, or suffer the least, with any type of serious graining or degradation problems when it matters.

I would still hesitate saying that about RedBull though because they simply don't have the power going through their wheels as much as Merc and Ferrari do. If they get equal power from Honda let's see how their chassis handles that and affects tyres.