F1

[Ivo Petović]

Najzad malo sreće za Rendžu, nismo danas bili za podijum, mislim da su i RP i AT, možda i Lekler, bili brži. Hvala sjajnim stratezima u ružičastom.

[Ratamahatta]

Sjebali su stazu, bila je mnogo bolja sa sikanom pred startni pravac. Uvek mi je uz Interlagos i Magny Cours bila omiljena na igricama.

[Radoye]

1 hour ago, Plajvi said:

Sjebali su stazu, bila je mnogo bolja sa sikanom pred startni pravac. Uvek mi je uz Interlagos i Magny Cours bila omiljena na igricama.

 

Jbg morali su da produze pravac kad su isekli Tamburelo, ona konfiguracija sa sikanom u Tamburelu i Varijantom Basa jednostavno ne funkcionise.

A jeste bilo zadovoljstvo na igricama kad ubodes perfektno tu sikanu

[Alukard]

Mana ovih starih staza je sto nisu dovoljno siroke za ove kamione koji se voze.

[Radoye]

4 hours ago, Alukard said:

Mana ovih starih staza je sto nisu dovoljno siroke za ove kamione koji se voze.

 

Ove stare staze nemaju mane, nego su danas bolidi predugacki

[Alukard]

Pa na to sam aludirao [emoji1745]

[Radoye]

Znam samo sam preformulisao i akcent stavio no pravi problem

[Ivo Petović]

Poslednjih 7 trka (od SPA)

 

Mercedes              258

Renault                   99

Red Bull                  91

Alfa Tauri                73

Mclaren                  72

Tracing point          71           

Ferrari                     42

 

Vozači

 

Hamilton       150

Bottas            108

Ricciardo         75

Verstappen      67

Perez                50

Gasly                49

Sainz                42

Leclerc             40

[Have_Fun]

just for fun
 

 

Ovaj tip mi je hit na youtubeu
Nakon svake trke napravi ovako nesto.. highlightsi trka mogu da se prate kroz njegove obrade pesama

Ovde mi je najzabavniji
 

 

[Jimmy Kowalski]

The incredible origin story of the Mercedes F1 era

Seven constructors’ titles, a century of victories (and counting), all manner of records and the unofficial naming rights to an entire era of Formula 1 – Mercedes’ dominance of the V6 turbo-hybrid formula has been total. Securing an unprecedented seventh consecutive teams’ championship with a one-two finish at Imola, where Lewis Hamilton clocked the 100th Mercedes race win since 2014, seemed a fitting way to reach the latest incredible milestones.

 

To some, it furthers the narrative that Mercedes has been on easy street in this engine era. Wind back the clocks to how it all began and Mercedes simply started early, was well prepared, avoided the problems that engulfed its opponents and swept all before it. Then never stopped. Those who believe that don’t know how close the all-conquering engine programme of 2014, which started all we see today, had come to crisis just a few months before.

 

 

As the simplistic assessment of how the Mercedes era began is recited to Andy Cowell, Mercedes’ former engine chief, he starts to smile and shake his head.

 

“That is a wholly wrong perception,” Cowell, managing director of Mercedes High Performance Powertrains from the start of 2013 until earlier this year, tells The Race.

 

“I suspect all the manufacturers went through the same issues, the same challenges, because the technical regulations were the same and science is the same regardless of the country that you’re operating in. And the new bits were new to everyone.

 

“We all went through the same suite of issues.”

 

Yet they emerged the other side in completely different conditions. Mercedes won 16 of the 19 grands prix in 2014 en route to its first title double, with Red Bull and Renault picking up a trio of victories when the Silver Arrows faltered. Ferrari failed to win at all. Honda’s comeback one year later was disastrous.

 

Had Mercedes not responded to its own issues during the build-up to 2014 the way it did, its tallies would probably look different – for the inaugural year of this engine era and the years that have followed.

 

“The, ‘oh, Crikey’ moment, the big ‘oh, Crikey’ moment, – and I’m coming up with a polite phrase there – was the week before the British Grand Prix in 2013,” says Cowell.

“We use a quality gate process to track our projects. And every single time we have a quality gate, they’re red because we’re always trying to do more than possible. That’s what you do in motorsport, and you just about get it right the evening before.

 

“But this particular quality gate we were all sat there going, ‘This is the brightest red quality gate we’ve ever had’. We’ve now signed up Williams to join us for 2014, because we suspect that McLaren will be departing in 2015. So, we’ve got four teams expecting the power unit. The investment that had gone into the capability of Brackley was manifesting itself with a good season in 2013, winning races and taking the fight to Red Bull. And we couldn’t do a power curve. We’ve got all sorts of life support systems making the power unit work.

 

“We’d got this vision of eight cars in Melbourne wanting this power unit, trying to work out how many sets of hardware we actually needed to take to not completely embarrass ourselves. And then realising we need to start making it in about two months time.

 

“That was one of those gut-wrenching quality gates, where it was like ‘holy shit’. There’s eight cars, there’s a new set of regulations. And we’re in that creek without a paddle.”

 

This behind-the-scenes ‘brink of crisis’ moment is just one aspect that makes the origin story of Mercedes’ current success so fascinating. Everybody remembers the first Jerez test in 2014 – cars not firing up, cars not making it out of the pitlane, cars being loaded onto flat-bed trucks and returned to the garage. Mercedes’ motivation the previous summer was the grim prospect of suffering all of that – but when it counted.

 

At a company meeting on the Friday of the 2013 British GP, Mercedes admitted internally it was “in trouble”. Cowell recalls that as the tipping point where the response would determine whether Mercedes could scale the mountain in front of it, or be defeated.

 

“Just imagine eight Mercedes/Brixworth-powered cars parked on the side of the track in Melbourne,” Cowell remembers saying. “That feels awful, doesn’t it?

“On the other hand, the others are in trouble as well. We’ve got an opportunity to shine. Big regulation changes don’t come along that often in the powertrain world. So, come on let’s grab hold of this opportunity and do something amazing.”

 

In reaction, Mercedes ceased its non-essential activities and switched the end goal from ‘winning the championship’ to ‘being ready for Australia’. Staff agreed to do an extra 10 hours of work a week and were redeployed to more critical areas.

 

“It was an emergency footing,” says Cowell. “There were many other events on the journey to that point and from that point that impacted individual departments and individual people.

 

“But I think that one point is a point that the majority of people that were in the business at that time would recognise as a key point in the journey.”

 

Reacting to setbacks is an underlying theme of the genesis of the Mercedes era. Picking out its ground zero is trickier. The extent of its preparations was such that Mercedes produced a single-cylinder prototype when F1 was planning for its turbo era to come in the form of inline-four engines – a decision the championship originally made at the end of 2010.

 

And Cowell admits that Mercedes made a conscious effort to start as early as it could. But that brought its own setbacks as F1’s regulations changed form in the summer of 2011 to the V6 turbo-hybrids we now know – “and some of us love!” points out Cowell – and were shunted back a year to 2014.

 

“We had one extra journey to practice. We had a single-cylinder running early on, which we had to adapt because we didn’t get all the parameters exactly as the regulations came out.

 

“We did a four-cylinder engine that we’d got head castings for and a crankcase ready for, which we threw in the skip!

 

“When it changed from the inline-four to the V6…yeah, we went home, we were grumpy, we had a glass of wine. But we dusted ourselves down and we came back the very next day, and we said ‘We’re going to have a V6 running before Christmas’. And we did have a V6 mule engine running before Christmas.

 

“So, we reacted with action.”

 

 

Mercedes was able to do this because it had invested a lot in F1’s hybrid direction already, under the leadership of Cowell’s predecessors as managing director Ola Kallenius (now Daimler’s CEO) and then Thomas Fuhr.

 

Its mastery of the original KERS system meant it was in good shape, because the Brixworth division had been prepped to produce that technology in-house. Battery, inverter and electric machine knowledge was known, which gave Mercedes’ operations and engineering group the confidence to commit to its own turbocharger design. Cowell says it meant “99% of the key ingredients were in our hands”.

 

“The innovation timescale was more compressed because of that capability that was already in the factory, and because of the ambition and the ‘come on let’s give it a go’ attitude,” says Cowell.

 

“We did an additional V6 iteration compared with everybody else.”

 

It meant the quality and quantity of work Mercedes could get through trumped that of its rivals. The ambition of the project cannot be understated, from the commitment to splitting the turbo and compressor arrangement – at the request of the chassis side – and making it work, to the approach HPP took through its development cycle.

“We listened to the fact there were going to be new regulations, and we did something about it,” says Cowell.

 

Mercedes’ chief designer John Owen tells The Race that not only was Cowell “very brave to indulge in the packaging” of the turbo-hybrid engine, he also had an ingenious but labour-intensive idea for the process.

 

“What he did is design three engines, effectively,” says Owen. “I think it weighed 250 kilos from memory, the first one. And it was an engine that was almost unbreakable. That was just there to understand performance development.

 

“He then made another engine that was very fragile, which was going to be the reliability engine, where they didn’t do much performance work.

 

“And then the third engine was kind of a marriage between the two of them, which is the one we took racing.

 

“Hats off to Brixworth for a very clever strategy there, I think they found a really, really good way of doing it. We heard other teams sort of tried to build their power unit for both performance and reliability and suffered the problems of lots of time spent with the engine broken and not being able to develop it.

 

“That was a really good call that they made. That’s why we were good on that side.”

 

 

Cowell sidesteps the responsibility for that decision, saying it was “not my plan, that was the plan that 20 to 30 leaders came up with at Brixworth and Brackley”. It was a key manifestation of a very, very well-integrated approach from Mercedes’ chassis and engine departments. But it was also a drain on human resources, requiring longer hours at the factory to make it happen.

 

The “unbreakable” engine shocked then-Mercedes boss Ross Brawn when he first saw it. Cowell’s priority was to ensure that the engine’s internals – pistons, conrods, bearing shells, etc. – were neatly detailed because they were of a style Mercedes wanted to race with. But everything ‘around’ it didn’t need to be pretty. The front cover, says Cowell, was so heavy it needed “several large men to lift it on”.

 

“When Ross saw it he was like…how are we going to fit that in the car?! How on this planet are we gonna fit that in the car?” laughs Cowell.

 

“I said, well, that’s the next journey.”

 

Which is where Mercedes’ process got tougher, and any theory of immunity to the challenges of the new rules crumbles.

 

The split-engines approach, which we’ll short-change by calling Point B of Mercedes’ masterplan, meant it could do its performance work without being affected by reliability and develop reliability without holding back performance development. The two streams then merged at the end, which we’ll call Point C – giving Mercedes the most powerful, most reliable engine of 2014 and the early years of the engine era.

 

But getting from Point B to Point C was not the work of a moment. It was with this race variant that Mercedes’ summer of discontent became apparent, with October/November deadline to get the final version fired up and, more pressingly, the need to share the engine’s design with the customers.

 

“We were having to release the designs of our Melbourne 2014 prized possession,” says Cowell, “and the device that we were learning from would only spend an hour in the test cell before it was heading off to intensive care for a full rebuild!

 

“That puts a huge drain on the engineering machine that’s trying to learn, but doesn’t want to commit to the spec to go racing with, and the operations machine instead of being asked to make 10 of a variant, then having to make 20 because we’ve blown all the first ones up.

 

“When bits are breaking, it puts huge pressure on every single department from a capacity perspective, engineering to solve the problems instead of releasing drawings, purchasing to buy more bits, manufacturing to make more bits, taking apart what they only just put together – and often it’s partly taken itself apart, which makes this assembly of the other bits even harder.

 

“Test cells also need development as well as the power unit. When it’s something completely new like that power unit was, the test cell couldn’t develop and get mature as well as the power unit.

 

“And Melbourne 2014 wasn’t going to move to the right. We knew that. The number of hours to that point were fixed and it just got more and more anxious.”

 

Being strict worked in the long run. Even though it required Cowell to threaten taking a sharp set of garden shears to any of the ‘life support’ systems that were being hooked up to the race variant in the vital throes of reliability work.

 

“It’s OK to have fuel going in, air going in and a nice strong shaft coming out the back with lots of power going through it,” Cowell told his staff. “But everything else, forget it.”

 

So the next stage of validation was to run the engine in the factory as if it was in a car, using a wireless telemetry link to observe all the data while it was run on the transient dyno. That taught Mercedes a lot about the installation and how temperatures would shift under engine covers, by exposing a lot of the issues.

 

Time and time again Mercedes would encounter a reliability problem and have to restart these learning loops, while also not getting the full learning out of each variant before committing to the next – because of the time pressures. It was a conscious decision to combine computer simulation with punishing physical tests of the hardware and “finding out what we don’t know about”.

 

There was a lot. “We’d had some spectacular failures on pass off on the dyno,” says Cowell.

 

 

“The first race engine the crank gear came off the front and broke into many pieces and took out the whole timing drive at the front of the engine before it got to 50 kilometres of life.”

 

So much focus was being put on reliability, and hardware being deployed to that side of the operation to fix problems, that Mercedes could have decided that the performance level reached in the summer of 2013 would be the base level for Melbourne. Older, tired hardware gave limited opportunities for useful learning before it let go, but the performance side feasted on the scraps.

 

There was a performance update in December that could be applied to the power unit without needing a new cylinder head. Cowell describes it as “relatively small component changes but a decent performance update”. The snag was it required a spend that hadn’t been accounted for, and that meant flying to Stuttgart to pitch for the funding.

 

The response? “Yeah, go for it,” Cowell smiles. “That was enjoyable.”

 

 

A couple of months later, in Bahrain testing, Mercedes struck gold again: “It was the first or second day. At lunchtime we literally wound in a performance update, which was one of the biggest performance updates I’ve ever seen.”

 

Advancements in power and reliability didn’t mean Mercedes turned up to pre-season testing where it wanted to be, let alone Melbourne. At Jerez, Mercedes rolled its cars out on time but its customer McLaren didn’t because a wiring loom had a coupe of wires the wrong way around. Lewis Hamilton suffered a broken front wing on day one which resulted in a big crash and cost valuable running time. Throughout testing, Mercedes wasn’t immune to electrical glitches and engine failures.

 

Ferrari also caught Mercedes’ eye, clocking a decent number of laps and also doing pitstops and live pullaways. Mercedes couldn’t do that. It hadn’t done the calibration work. So Ferrari was looking half-decent, if a little down on power.

 

As testing continued though, Mercedes edged ahead. The mileage increased, the lap times dropped. It was becoming clear that the Mercedes engine was the benchmark but it was married to a handy chassis. Then in Bahrain, the best engine got even better. By the time testing finished Mercedes-powered cars had topped 11 of the 12 test days and were leagues clear in the mileage stakes. But the team still wasn’t ready.

 

Among the lingering concerns was potential gearbox fragility, according to Owen, with the spike of torque as a cylinder fires that “twists up the gearbox”. On the V6 turbo-hybrids, the effect was “at least four times worse, if not five times” than the preceding V8s.

 

That meant the gearbox, revised to include an eighth forward gear ratio for 2014, was “a lot, lot bigger and heavier”. And it had to last an extra race compared to 2013 as well. From a structural perspective, Cowell adds that the turbocharger on the Mercedes is tucked inside the crankcase whereas on some of the other power unit manufacturers that turbocharger is poking out the back.

 

 

“So you’ve got a red hot lump to somehow wrap your gearbox around and still maintain some structure in that,” says Cowell.

Owen adds that for the Brackley side: “That’s always a worry because you haven’t made the engine. And you haven’t mated it to the gearbox, so you did worry if the gearbox is gonna survive it.

 

“We did take some gearbox issues in 2014, I think a lot of the teams did as they learned these things. But that was a concern.”

 

And the engine itself was still a colossal unknown. Cowell recalls the concern heading to Melbourne being: “Crikey how many more of those young failures are we going to experience for the first time on the other side of the planet from where the factory is? We’re not going to be able to work some magic overnight here, we’re just gonna have to load another one in.

 

“And are we going to get to the embarrassing point where there isn’t another one to load in the car, and the car’s in the garage because we’ve let the side down because everything’s blown up?

 

“There were many systems, the internal combustion engine was unknown, a crank gear coming off early in life, MGU-K failures, MGU-H failures, turbocharger bearing issues, control electronics issues, lots of modified boards going into the ERS module…

 

“Pretty much every system was not tested to the degree that we’d like. I think all of that added up does make it the most uncertain start of a season. Which is why every race was a new experience to be honest.”

 

 

Mercedes’ reliability concerns were founded when Hamilton’s season opener was ruined almost instantly because of a coil drop tube problem. But Nico Rosberg won at a canter and the two would go on to dominate the season, with Hamilton prevailing in the title battle, and Mercedes crushed its opposition in the constructors’ championship.

So those new experiences turned out kinder for Mercedes than most as reaped the rewards of its intense, flawed, clever, frustrated preparations, and the trials and tribulations that took Mercedes to the brink of questioning if it was possible – then deciding emphatically that it was.

 

“That made 2013 an exciting year, which to the outside world made 2014 look like a glorious success,” says Cowell.

 

“We were just the least bad.”

 

 

Mercedes has continued in that vein for seven seasons now, which makes the fears approaching the dawn of this engine era seem rather silly with hindsight. But they were real.

 

From the early investment in infrastructure and expertise to the crunch meeting in which Mercedes felt it was a crossroads between triumph and despair, there were plenty of opportunities for Mercedes to trip over the new rules in the way its rivals did.

 

A mega engine still needed to be mated to a championship-quality chassis of course, or else the customers could have trumped the works team in 2014. And Mercedes would have been vulnerable to the recovering Red Bull and Ferrari in the years that followed.

 

The history made at Imola last weekend tells you how good a job Mercedes did, and has continued to do, in building a car worthy of the engine that took so long to master.

 

But that’s another story.

 

[Jimmy Kowalski]

How Mercedes designed F1’s best car but kept it secret

 

Mercedes has achieved extraordinary successes since 2014, perhaps none as underestimated as toppling Red Bull as Formula 1’s foremost car designer.

 

Mastering the new V6 turbo-hybrid engine formula provided a platform to mount championship challenges and signing Lewis Hamilton secured a driver to lead them.

But fail to build a good enough car and all Mercedes would have is the crucial missing link.

 

The works team scored its first victory in 2012 but was otherwise something of an also-ran among F1’s best and brightest for the first three seasons of its existence.

 

 

Transforming into a title winner in 2014 seems incomprehensible without the massive shift in engine rules that accompanied it, given how Mercedes replaced Red Bull as an untouchable leading force and won 16 of 19 races.

 

But there was an interim step from 2012 to 2013, and the importance of the Mercedes W04 cannot be understated. Mercedes would not be on the brink of seven consecutive F1 title doubles without it.

 

“That car was the first car to have everything done the right way,” says chief designer John Owen.

 

“We had the structures, the right people in the right places, and a single-minded philosophy of how we were going to approach the car and all its challenges and complexities.”

 

Mercedes leapt from a three-year low of fifth in 2012 with only 142 points to being Red Bull’s biggest rival in 2013, scoring 360 points and beating Ferrari to the runner-up spot.

 

That’s an enormous one-season swing with stable regulations but it was years in the making, the culmination of a crucial internal reconciliation and the team having the resources to go toe-to-toe with its intended rivals.

 

When Mercedes took over Brawn Grand Prix, on the surface it looked like the purchase of a turn-key title-winning operation. But Brawn’s phoenix-like 2009 success was the result of immense Honda resources that had been ploughed in until the Japanese manufacturer decided to withdraw in 2008.

 

 

In the background the project escalated and escalated then suddenly slowed down. Brawn did enough to win in 2009 but when Mercedes took over its plan was based on the Resource Restriction Agreement that was meant to bring other big teams down to the level Brawn GP had naturally fallen to. In fact, Ross Brawn said he even had his first 2010 budget proposal cut by £29million.

 

But the RRA was applied…loosely. Mercedes fell back. Brawn claimed Mercedes considered pulling out over the winter of 2011/12 but instead committed to fresh investment. Toto Wolff’s arrival helped – as he revealed Mercedes’ budget was the same as Williams’s (but with more expensive drivers).

 

With funds committed and new technical personnel like Geoff Willis and Aldo Costa joining, Mercedes also needed to get internal departments pulling in the same direction. That’s what happened with the 2013 car.

 

 

The W04 is Owen’s favourite Mercedes, a car that represented a massive breakthrough. Though it had “lots of detail that’s just the right compromise on all the right things and the round the back end it’s a proper step forward”, there were bits that “we didn’t get around to finish”.

 

But the design team had a “much more coherent view in the way we did things, guiding what we were going to do and what we weren’t going to do”.

 

Owen says that during 2012, the various elements of the car – tyres, aerodynamics, engines, trackside inputs, driver input – were still competing with one another. Various points were being made in the pursuit of improving individual areas while the global picture was ignored.

 

Mercedes’ solution was to establish the Performance Group, which comprised the key performance members of the team. That would prioritise the pursuit of one direction, right or wrong. If it was right it worked well. If it was wrong, it was a lesson learned.

 

“We just got together and agreed what we were going to do amongst ourselves, we had tough conversations, and we all worked together, four or five of us, what we were going to do and how we were going to go forward,” says Owen.

 

“At that moment it just got better, better, better. And that’s probably ground zero, and the 2013 car was the first product of that. It was a very useful statement of intent for the future.”

 

However obvious that sounds, it was vital. “The problem that lots of teams have is that they don’t work well as teams,” says Owen. “Everybody’s sort of pushing in their own direction. And the problem with that is it when things are not going well you don’t really know which bit was a good bit and which was a bad bit.

 

“The thing that really changed for the team was certainly on the performance side all of us together just thrashed out what we were going to say is our direction, what assumptions we were going to make where we didn’t have data. And we were all going to work in that direction.

 

“The 2013 car was the first example of ‘wow, that as a process is really effective’. And now it is surprising to think we never thought like this before. But we’ve come across quite a few organisations over the years and realised it’s quite a common thing.

 

 

“It’s not any sort of silver bullet, technical thing. It’s just basically working together as a very strong coherent team. That’s really where things really started to move at that point.

 

“Once everyone said we’re focused in one direction, it was easy to make the right decisions.”

 

Once Mercedes had made that breakthrough, the on-track step was significant. That coincided with Hamilton’s arrival and Mercedes won three races in 2013, including Hamilton’s first victory in Hungary before the summer break.

 

But Red Bull obliterated the opposition after the shutdown and Sebastian Vettel won nine races on the spin.

 

Mercedes was privately quite pleased as it became clear Red Bull worked on its car to the end. Because once W04’s potential was clear, it had served its purpose and the 2013 season wasn’t the priority.

 

“We didn’t develop it that long into that year, and then we abandoned it and got working on 2014,” confirms Owen. “It was very different with the engine architecture and integration into the car so a complete sort of tear-up really.

 

“It wasn’t worth spending a large part of the year updating the 2013 car.”

 

That was when full attention turned to 2014 but the genesis of W05 goes back several years.

 

Willis was employed as project leader of the chassis and was dedicated to that project from a very early point. He was given the project in the conceptual stage and over 12-18 months this was handed over to head of the engineering group Costa, who started to turn it into reality.

 

This was a deliberate strategy from Mercedes to have a very small number of people focused on long-term projects.

 

“Unless we have an earthquake and we are in a massive crisis, then they stay out of the daily mainstream tasks,” wrote Brawn in his book. “It pains me when people aren’t left alone to get on with their future project.”

 

As time passed, more and more focus turned to 2014. Mercedes had fortnightly meetings, alternating between Brackley and Brixworth, with a handful of representatives from the engine and car projects attending to update on how they were doing. Left and right brain were in constant communication.

 

This was just as important on the chassis side as the engine. Building the car and engine in unison meant Mercedes maximised the rules for both – and the extent of the car changes for 2014 are often overlooked. The noses were lower significantly, the width of the front wing was reduced, and minimum weight increased by 48kg.

 

At the back of the car the lower beam wing was removed, the top box was reduced by 10% with a bigger DRS slot. Brake-by-wire systems were introduced on the rear brakes in parallel with increased energy recovery and the gearboxes were revised to have an extra forward ratio and last longer despite being placed under significantly more duress by the increased torque of the new hybrid engines.

 

“The aerodynamics of the car changed a lot in 2014,” says Owen. “Various bits and pieces were chopped off around the car. We lost the exhaust blowing that we had in 2013 so quite a big hit on the car side.

 

“So, the car project itself was actually really quite big and if you’ve got a certain number of aerodynamicists and a certain amount of windtunnel time it’s important for you to understand where you deploy them. And if your vision is one of long-term success in the sport, you have to plan and look at the long-term.

 

“The way that W04 was running early in the year in 2013, we thought ‘it’s not slow, it’s quite a decent car, and it might be second, it might be third – but it’s not going to be first’.

“It’s actually a big step forward so realistically we wanted to move our focus to 2014.”

 

Red Bull didn’t seem to have the same plan. Brawn writes that “Red Bull always seemed to be for the now, tomorrow and very short term”, developed to the end of 2013, having also “appeared to put very little early effort into Renault to help them design a new engine”.

 

Mercedes, so heavily invested in its 2014 car and engine builds for so long, was primed to take advantage.

 

“We now know from people who were working at Red Bull in 2013 who have since joined us that the one thing that W04 did is put them under pressure to defend in 2013,” says Owen.

 

 

“It stopped them looking forward to 2014.

 

“That was actually really, really effective to make your competitor think you’re catching them and they have to also spend resources, while in reality we were fully on to 2014 with the engine and the chassis.”

 

If there was a tangible “epiphany” with the 2013 car it was that Mercedes understood how to make the tyres work for the first time. That set it up well for 2014 onwards although amusingly its confidence was not total, and the extent of its performance advantage after the rules changed was such that the drivers were taking it easy through the corners just to be safe.

 

That played a part in Mercedes’ actual advantage early in 2014 not being fully known, even within the team.

 

 

“Even when we turned the engine down it still went very quickly down the straights, so we would often sort of pootle round the corners,” Owen admits.

 

“We were still a little bit nervous about our tyre life in those early years when we still weren’t fully on top of tyres.

 

“So the power unit was great because it just allowed us to sort of really take it easy in the races through the corners and maintain good lap times.

 

“I don’t think any one of us expected to have the margin we did have in 2014, I think our dream was that we would be closer to the front. We expected the status quo to be maintained, but we hoped we would be a bit closer.

 

“The advantage we had was not actually apparent to a lot of the team until Bahrain when the two drivers got into a little bit of a battle and pushed the car properly.

“At that point we realised just how big a margin we really had.”

 

Bahrain 2014 was the first stunner of the V6 era and exactly what it needed after a controversial birth, thanks to Mercedes’ domination of the opening two grands prix and criticisms emerging from some of F1’s most significant names, including Vettel and Bernie Ecclestone.

 

Hamilton and Rosberg went at each other hammer and tong, duking it out all race. A late safety car compressed the field and on lap 46 Sergio Perez was just 1.7s off the lead in the Force India. One lap later he was 4.4s behind. By the flag 10 laps later: 24s.

 

 

Mercedes had opened the taps and immense performance had come pouring out.

 

Then-Mercedes High Performance Powertrains boss Andy Cowell laughs when he reflects on the first time he saw his precious power units singing so loudly. He says the thought running through his mind as the two drivers took lumps out of each other was: “Turn it down! Arghhhhhhh!”

 

Cowell continues: “The schoolboy in me’s going, ‘Woah look at them race!’ because that was exciting. The engineer was going ‘oh shit, this is the last thing we need’.”

 

Another example of the engine’s superiority over its rivals was in Canada. Cowell’s worst fears were realised when both cars suffered MGU-K failures at almost exactly the same time. Hamilton was quickly forced into retirement but Rosberg, incredibly, continued in the lead even with an absence of around 160bhp.

 

It was only right at the very end that victory was snatched from his grasp by Red Bull’s Daniel Ricciardo, but it showed that even a down-on-power Mercedes could fight the opposition – the chassis was clearly excellent as well.

 

 

But Cowell insists Mercedes had a good idea of the ultimate potential of the package well before then.

 

“I think we already knew where we were, we just hadn’t shown it,” he says.

 

“We were spending more time working out what performance level we should run going into qualifying. We wanted to make sure we’re on the front row, but we didn’t want it to be too big a gap to the second row.

 

“James Vowles and myself spent a lot of time working out what mode should we run in, so we kind of knew where we were against the others, because we imagined they got it wound up to 11.”

 

As Mercedes swept all before it across the opening races, it was clear that Ferrari and Renault were toiling by comparison. Ferrari’s car was also not looking particularly great, even in the hands of Fernando Alonso.

 

But Red Bull, fresh from four consecutive title doubles, was given the benefit of the doubt. And the easy conclusion was that Mercedes was winning simply because of the engine rules.

 

Mercedes was heading to the front of the grid regardless, though. In the years that have followed 2014, it has become clearer that it really is car AND engine – a process that began in 2014 when Mercedes produced the undisputed best package. Not just the “least bad” power unit.

 

The side-benefit to the performance of W05 not being stressed early on, in addition to making it easier to conserve the engine and tyres, was that Mercedes was able to validate that its car was “actually quite decent” without broadcasting that to the wider world.

 

And there was “no frustration” internally that the engine was winning the plaudits. Partly because Brackley recognised the brilliance of the product Brixworth created. But also because letting rivals think it was all the engine quickly became a deliberate ploy.

 

“We were quite happy in a way for the engine to be having the headlines because we didn’t have to drive the car very quickly,” Owen confirms.

 

“You could imagine some of the guys here on the chassis side might have felt a little bit sad, but to be honest it was an active policy by us. Because the thing about the chassis is all its performance items are on show for everybody else to copy.

 

“Whereas the power unit, nobody really knows how the power unit is that powerful, what combustion technology you’ve got. They can only speculate. But it’s all inside the engine, there’s nothing you can see really on the outside.

 

“So, letting the other teams believe that it was all about the engine was something we were keen to do.

 

“For years people copied Red Bull aerodynamically, they all did a Red Bull copy and that suited us just fine. That was something we were quite keen to encourage and if that meant talking down the chassis and bigging up the engine then we were more than happy to do that.”

 

Mercedes was revelling in its new-found design confidence as it approached the challenge of 2014 and came up with what Owen describes “some pretty adventurous suspension”, which left him a little worried how it would react under braking at the front end. This was an important aspect of the W05’s aero concept and required a very narrow span front lower wishbone, which Owen confesses “didn’t really look like it should work”.

 

“The whole front end aerodynamic treatment that we were doing, we felt was pretty good,” he says. “That wasn’t to say that we were arrogantly assuming we had the best solution because there’s always a better solution but we were reasonably comfortable with it and it definitely suited us to make everybody believe it was all down to the engine.

 

“We’re not trying to lie to anyone but equally we were quite happy they were getting the wrong end of the stick and we certainly weren’t going to try and correct them on that!”

 

 

Given Mercedes remained on top when major new aero rules came in for 2017, and the fact the high-rake Red Bull concept has still yet to surpass Mercedes’ philosophy even now in 2020, it’s curious to ponder how long rivals continued to underestimate the quality of the chassis side of the operation – and whether that led some teams down blind alleys.

 

What’s certain is that Mercedes’ efforts to conceal the effectiveness of its car extended beyond 2014.

 

Across the early years of the engine era Mercedes would run lower wing levels than its rivals “to make the engine look better on the straights”.

 

“People would look at speed traps and talk about the engine, and I think even when the Ferrari engine was sort of similar on performance we would tend to a lower wing level,” says Owen.

 

“These are all funny things to say now because this era of Formula 1’s kind of coming to an end and everybody’s very much copying our aero philosophy now, with the different front end approach to noses and hopefully they don’t catch up.

 

“It was important to keep people on the wrong path as much as we could do and that’s a good thing to do. So, no frustration!”

 

The world has woken up now. Title after title, across aero rule changes no less, and retaliation in the face of rejuvenated efforts from Red Bull and Ferrari have blatantly broadcast the fact that Mercedes builds quick race cars, not just powerful engines.

 

Spectacular attention-grabbing innovations like the dual-axis steering system have since earned the chassis side of the operation plenty of plaudits of its own.

 

The Mercedes era is twinned with the V6 formula for good reason, but like the engines that have underpinned the team’s success the car design philosophy has very, very deep roots. It is part of why the team rose to prominence and a huge factor in how it has stayed on top and continues to get better.

 

History will reflect very kindly on both Brackley and Brixworth, rightly crediting them as two halves of one whole. As Mercedes persists in reaping the rewards of that, so its rivals continue to chase shadows as they come to terms with how far they’ve fallen behind.

 

 

[Jumanji]

[Radoye]

 

[ducca]

Vijetnam otpao za 2021, a možda i forever. Ipak 22 trke.

[Alukard]

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