Mercedes GP - Inauguration and 1st season

[xpensive]

I have a distant memory of Peter Windsor praising the worth ethics in the US when returning "home" after Christmas a year ago, everyone was working rather than being shitfaced on Santa's juice in the backwards Europe he said.

It turned out that the entire thing was a hoax, he had stayed at a motel somewhere in the Carolinas the whole time, from where he could not possibly been aware of things like the US-employment laws such as "whatever-I-can-sue-you-for".

Guess that member donskar has a story or two to tell on the subject?

What matters here, I think, is not the flexibility of the workforce per se, but the sheer engagement and enthusiasm of the combined brainpower, such as when I managed to keep my notoriously hourly-minded egineering staff to bear with me
until 1900 on Friday. This was including my boss.

Here's the point, does RB have the mandate or the presence to convcince the doctors of this and that to stick around on a late Friday in Stuttgart to finish what they started?

[vealio]

Mercedes GP hire suspension engineer Toshi Iguchi from Toyota motorsport

http://twitter.com/scarbsf1

[segedunum]

...it's bad enough that I receive their corporate info on my Lotus Notes about an office in Jakarta having a public holiday.

Lotus Notes. Christ. The best way I know of of getting people to stop using e-mail, mostly because they can't use it even if they wanted to.

Well, Mercedes are not going to run a Formula 1 team and certainly not win on the cheap. I find that ironic since this was painted as such a fantastic deal for Mercedes and Brawn have £60 million down the back of a sofa somewhere from the end of 2009.

Politics inevitably pervade manufacturer teams. That's what we've learned over the past ten years or so. The manufacturers all think they can tell the teams and their engineers how to build fast moving vehicles, they get all excited when they start out on this 'journey' to glory, and they then all seem to get rather upset when they realise that they can't and they couldn't actually organise a piss-up in a brewery.

With Red Bull they set up a technology company and they're using Formula 1 to push that on. With McLaren they're a racing company first who are using their racing experience to now build cars. The results are pretty nice thus far. Ferrari are a car company that thankfully for them have a long history of being a racing company that sells cars. Mercedes? At the moment they're yet another manufacturer who think they can tell their racing team how to make cars go fast, and worse, as others have pointed out they're a bunch of doctors full of their own self importance.

[marcush.]

I feel qualified to comment on this :If you got the passion it works even in series development.On my last working day for the famous company somewhere in Germany (all externals were released due to the crisis)I left the office at 20:00 doing as much as possible to keep my baby on track(this was lining out all potential issues I could imagine coming along) till sop which is in 2011 btw.I had a staggering 6months of safety in my timeplanning all things sorted when I left.Coincidently I now work on the other side of the table (supplier) also for the very same project and surprise surprise they managed to get as far as not being able to meet ANY Milestone since then .It´s the people who sit (!) behind the desk.
You need to do it.Usually I did not check out but wrote my working hours manually and let my boss decide how many he was prepared to stand up for as no ways you will be allowed to work more in an automotive environment.So you need to be creative....but the regular engineer is very much 8hour employee -and does work HIS work and there is still the next day...mymy..

[xpensive]

Conclusively, I doubt if RB can plan on much develpment help from Daimler R&D, some long term research perhaps, but nothing to match the development pace within F1. Unless he accepts a flat 12 with barbeque xhaust perhaps?

http://www.forix.com/8w/engines/m291.jpg

What were they thinking?

[marcush.]

+1
believe me those chaps STILL think that they had the better ideas back then and would start exactly where they stopped 10 years ago.
I´ve seen strange things planned for the next years already...
No Daimler is no help for Ross ..it is the other ways round.They are the ones who behave like they are paying the bills and fear for their image and are those who really know how big boys do it..very dangerous ..MUCH paper and even more justifying and getting your a.. towards the wall.

[mep]

I can feel with you marcush because I am in a similar situation.
Ironically they are still sitting behind their desk talking about their last holiday and what they could do in the next one while you got kicked out.

[xpensive]

However, there could be large-scale benefits from being part of a corporation such as Daimler, MGP should not have to buy a "Cray" of their own and I'm sure their mother has a special agreement with Lufthansa?

I would be surprised if MGP's recruiting passes through the Stuttgart HR, but imagine if it is that way, jeeeez....

[segedunum]

It would kind of make the 'resource restriction' a bit stupid, wouldn't it? A point I've tried to make rather repeatedly..........

[marcush.]

seg
I think you are right a bit but realistically the access of the teams to relevant
recorces within the manaufacturers are limited.
So todays we got Ferrari wich is surely not to be counted towards big OEM -so there is not much expertise to feed back into the f1 team
Renault -on their way out already so really only feedback into the engine side
Lotus :-not even worth mentioning
Mercedes the one entity with the strength in depth to supply anything of worth to their f1 team, if this was practical.
VW not seen yet in F1

[xpensive]

That's a thought, should there be a limit on TB's going in and out from the team's mainframe, see how ridicilous this is?

But I don't know what is really important for MGP and Daimler here, perhaps realizing that RB worked in collusion with his former boss and mentor, MrM, all the time, that the entire "DDD" thing was a perfect scam from the word go.

I remember the beginning of this clearly, as I was in London in late January in order to celebrate my umptenth birthday.
I had just paid for paper copies of Autosport, Motorsport and what not, parked my corpus in a decent pub to enjoy.

First thing that confronts me are shots of a Williams with a diffuser totally out of sync with the new rules, second thing
was a firm statement from MrM how he appreciated certain team's "creativity". Get the f**k outa here.

[JohnsonsEvilTwin]

Ok, so Mercedes Stuttgart cant really help much for Mercedes GP in Brackley.
Moot point, the whole idea revolves around Brackley being able to do the vast majority of it by themselves.

I would have serious reservations of Ferrari's F1 team if everytime they had a problem they would wander off towards the car division for some ideas. It will not happen. Sure Ferrari road cars carry some F1 DNA, but I doubt the flow of information is a two way thing. I stand to be corrected, but like I said I have my reservations.

Furthermore, Brawn has already intimated that most of what they get from Mercedes is actually tyre information. The setup at Stuttgart can in no real tangible way contribute much to the effort, as it does not have the expertise.
To build blitzkreig AMG's they setup AMG. To build mini city cars they set up Smart(C'mon the roadsters pretty decent ) To build F1 cars they bought Honda/Brawn. Eventually and in time the place will be Mercedes proper(should the board commit past 2013, but not until time has had an impact.

[JohnsonsEvilTwin]

Further interviews have started to appear.

"To give you an example, a pull-rod rear suspension was something that some of my engineers wanted to do, but when it came down to it we opted for a more conservative approach and stuck to what we knew.

"I didn't feel we were in a position to do that back then, because if it didn't go right we could have been in an even worse situation than we are now.

"I didn't restructure the team until earlier this year. What I feel now is that I have got an organisation where I am very comfortable if they want to tackle those sorts of challenges. I'm encouraging them to do so."

RB

[xpensive]

I think you're forgetting RB's most important quote;

"Grapes? No, I don't think so, I never liked grapes much, as a mattter of fact I always hated grapes, ask anyoune!"

[JohnsonsEvilTwin]

The underlying ethos is there X...take it or leave it.