I’d be interested to hear the opinion of those that really do know what they’re talking about, but from all I’ve seen Merc may have a car that isn’t a complete driver-crippling embarrassment by the end of the season, but not a championship winner - I strongly suspect that’s going to take a 2014-tier total ground-up reboot in 2023 for that to happen.
If that miracle does come-to-pass, Merc would still need to compel George to suck-up being the supporting act, 'cos Lewis’s age and mental state is going to be against him after two years of frustration…
I like Lewis, and have huge respect for him, but it’s a “nup” from me.
Oof. Nice stories for Latifi ahead of his home race
If Williams no longer needs his $$$ then he really has served his time and needs to move on.
Makes complete sense for Alpine to have Piastri placed ASAP. If they re-sign Alonso for next year, then there’s no place for PIastri, and if Fred moves on (return to McLaren?) then he has some experience under his belt.
I will try to summarise how the aero is developed (might be interesting background to some) to illustrate the consequences of increasing ride heights.
Aerodynamicists are grouped together, typically one team lead and 3 or 4 aeros. Their job is to come up with a wide range if ideas to test in the wind tunnel. The team leads and principal aero will then get together to triage this list as generally there will be too many ideas to test in the wind tunnel CFD allowance.
Aero design engineers then get involved to make CAD models of any ideas to be tested in CFD (they may have started designing some of the more complicated ideas for the above triage process).
Each team will then use CFD time to further eliminate ideas that are not likely to work and then test ideas that are thought likely to work in the wind tunnel.
The ideas that demonstrate the greatest downforce increase and or drag reduction are then considered for manufacture (as an aside, this is where aero teams make the biggest mistakes in my experience). A series of these components will then be put together as a full car release or an aero upgrade package. These are then manufactured and tested and or raced if they work.
As the aero on an F1 car still generates more downforce closer to the ground, there is a reinforcing development cycle that pushes the car to run at lower and lower ride heights, as that is where the performance is to be found.
The consequence of all this is the cars will work at higher ride heights, but the performance will be considerably worse, and it may not be possible to get a reasonable balance on the car, as the performance at higher ride heights will not have been targeted as they will not expect to run the car there.
It is the quality of the ideas that get compared which leads to a competitive car.
Having experience of what the flowfield is like around the car and what influences it is important.
If you already have a quick car and lots of money the 1000 monkeys approach can keep it good.
That doesn’t work when there is a big rule change - that is when experience counts.
I have worked with a group of engineers who were comp[letely convinced they had optimised everything as well as anybody but they had just not tried what was most important and a 30% gain was achieved by dealing with the key flow, which they hadn’t sussed.
I think, Ian? , that key members of the group who conceived the 2009 Brawn, for the last big rule change, are no longer at Mercedes. I am fairly sure they have built the car using their best ideas the team has but nobody there has good enough ones it seems to me.
Whether you prefer Toto to Christian is one thing. What is indisputible, IMO, is that Horner took over a team which had never performed all that well and managed it with the right hires and so forth into a multi Championship winning team.
Wolf OTOH inherited the fruits of Ross Brawn’s management efforts and managed not to fuck it up whilst the rules barely changed.
Now we can see which is the better.
IMHO of course.
Yes, the Merc aero team is very different to the 2009 team that was spread around the world, even in those days!
If you want to make a fast car then you need at least one of and preferably 2 aspects of your development process to be at the top level.
The first is exactly as you have described Frank, where the aero team needs to have people that really understand the flowfield and what needs to happen to produce a better flowfield.
The second is to have set of tools and evaluation processes which will tell the team whether any change to the flowfield will really make you faster or not. This is where the grid is really weak, and is my area of expertise.
The big question that I have had relates to your comments Frank. But I will word it slightly differently:
Which of the following is likely to produce the fastest car:
An Adrian Newey type who really understand the flowfield and how to make it work.
A team of average to good F1 aero engineers with the most advanced simulation toolset in F1 (i.e. what I could lead a team to develop and apply). Incidentally, this process would act like a teaching / learnng process as the better ideas would be rewarded.
A combination of weaker 1. and 2.
Incidentally one of the reasons that the Technical Directors and owners do not understand whether their aero engineers are any good, is that the tracker they all use, does not really tell them whether the aero developments are any good. And the fact that they think it does tell them is part of why the grid is so spread out despite the weaker teams having more wind tunnel time than teams in front of them. And despite the proof at the track showing that they are under performing, the owners seem to struggle to change things, I guess in part because they have little to no means to understand if a new leader etc will do a better job, and hence recruitment at that level is based on egos, politics and their mates and not on technical competence.
Frank, I agree with all that you have written, and have added some additional comments below.
Horner has done an amazing job taking a team that was completely nowhere and making it one of the top 3.
As you have stated, Wolf inherited what Ross Brawn and Bob Bell (need to add Bob as he was key in all this) had set up, which was designed to deliver long term success, as long as those that followed did not change things dramatically.
Interestingly Merc used 50% of the vehicle performance development concept that I led the development of, with one other very good engineer from 2010 to 2012 (they still work for Merc, albeit have lived in Australia for 5 years now). 50% of the concept worked very well with the rules up until around 2019 where the non stop efforts of the FIA, Ferrari and RBR to change to rules so that Merc lost their advantage started to have some impact.
The article was thought-provoking, since it implies (if not-quite states) that the best direction for Liberty to develop F1 is not whoring races out to dictatorships and toxic shitholes for sportswashing purposes, but rather to develop popularity at fan level.
Seems blindingly obvious, but clearly never a concern in Bernie’s era.
I like the current number of races - around 20 is good - but more would be fatiguing whichever side of the telly-screen you are
I’ve already reached burnout, tbh - I simply can’t tell the family to piss off every other weekend for 10 months of the year (and don’t want to either)
