2017 Williams Martini Racing Team - Mercedes

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Scuderia1967
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Joined: 20 Jan 2014, 16:43

Re: 2017 Williams Martini Racing Team - Mercedes

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rich1701 wrote:It's interesting Williams overlooked Paul Di Resta. He is part of that team. Personally i would much rather have him in the car than Massa. Massa is not consistent enough and lacks race craft these days It's a business decision and not a racing one to keep Massa. It has been claimed that Martini want Massa because of his marketability particularly in Brazil and his age, two young guns wouldn't work for them. and i suspect keeping Massa would have saved Williams money in contractual terms as I suspect his results over the last 3 years activated a performance clause which is why they didn't renew it in the first place.
Di Resta was sacked by Force India in the end of 2013, and hasn't driven a F1 since.


LookBackTime
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Re: 2017 Williams Martini Racing Team - Mercedes

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Aerodynamics a key flaw of 2016 Williams F1 car, says Claire Williams

http://www.autosport.com/news/report.ph ... -key-flaws

Stalker1
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Joined: 08 Dec 2015, 00:53

Re: 2017 Williams Martini Racing Team - Mercedes

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Unfortunately, the article does not contain anything new! Although, for me there are some interesting sentences:

1) Former technical chief Pat Symonds - whose departure from the team was confirmed on Tuesday - conceded mid-season that development had not been strong enough while Valtteri Bottas said Williams had lost performance in high-speed corners while improving in low-speed ones?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_ ... ix_results

It seems that minor improvment in low-speed corners caused major backlash in high speed corners?!

2) There are areas to improve on across the whole team. "If we were doing things perfectly, we'd be winning the world championship and we're not."

What they mean about that? Are pointing to the development team?

LookBackTime
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Re: 2017 Williams Martini Racing Team - Mercedes

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Stalker1 wrote:Unfortunately, the article does not contain anything new! Although, for me there are some interesting sentences:
...

2) There are areas to improve on across the whole team. "If we were doing things perfectly, we'd be winning the world championship and we're not."

What they mean about that? Are pointing to the development team?
In my opinion this is a little more complex. So not only the development team did not delivered.
From other interviews resulted that the team did not have the capacity (not enough money, people, computer simulations, 2017 car development - they are working almost full time from April - May, other reasons .... ) to try different avenues. So they put all the hope into just one direction of development that they though will provide most aero gains.
And it did not work!

The aero guys hit a wall with the development of 2016 car (after two good years of development). In order to make new aero bits to work is was required for the dynamic of the car to behave in a specific way (here we can include: types, suspension, ...).
They could not solve it in a consistent way. It just worked from time to time.

One more thing: wind tunnel numbers looked very good. But bits put on the car did not produce the expected gains.


LookBackTime
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Re: 2017 Williams Martini Racing Team - Mercedes

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Valtteri Bottas is out of the picture! And the Williams Martini car has the number 19 :)

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ringo
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Re: 2017 Williams Martini Racing Team - Mercedes

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Yes and Massa on the wall seems to be walking back to the cockpit... :mrgreen:
For Sure!!

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SR71
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Re: 2017 Williams Martini Racing Team - Mercedes

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When was there a gloss white chassis recently?

15/16 where matte white?

LookBackTime
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Re: 2017 Williams Martini Racing Team - Mercedes

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Stroll impressing Williams in Villeneuve-like rookie test program
By: Valentin Khorounzhiy, News Editor


Williams' outgoing tech chief Pat Symonds says he was impressed by Lance Stroll's performances in his pre-F1 test programme, likening the Canadian's preparation to that of compatriot Jacques Villeneuve.

Stroll will be entering F1 in next year, graduating into a Williams race seat after he became European F3 champion in 2016.

Faced with a big jump from F3 to F1, the Canadian is going through an extensive testing programme, one that Symonds compared to how Williams prepared compatriot Villeneuve for his respective F1 debut two decades ago.

Villeneuve was runner-up in his first year in F1 in 1996, before becoming champion with Williams in 1997.

"There were those programmes - I think Jacques Villeneuve did a very focused programme with Williams in 1995, I know that they specifically went off to a lot of tracks, which weren’t where the teams were testing at the time," Symonds said.

"Generally speaking, with all the guys who were proper test drivers, they went and did testing so they got the miles under their belt - but the focus was always on them developing the car rather than us developing the drivers.

"We’ve turned it around on this one so it is a bit more like Jacques’ old programme of teaching the driver.

"For example, in Abu Dhabi, he [Stroll] did pitstop practice and we had the full pitstop crew and pitstop practice after pitstop practice after pitstop practice. The crew don’t need that practice, but he does. That is where the focus is."

Symonds has been encouraged by Stroll's progress so far, referring to the Canadian's fast learning rate as an obvious "hallmark of a good driver".

"I think it has been quite enlightening. The programme involves a 2014 car and these academy tyres – and the academy tyres are quite different.

"You don’t know how different, we don’t have data on them - but what we can do is look at what Lance is doing with his data compared to Valtteri [Bottas] in 2014 and Felipe [Massa] – and I’ve been quite impressed.

"He gets down to learning a circuit quite quickly, and that is always a hallmark of a good driver. And by the end of two days in the car, he is running quite well.

"What is more – he is learning. A lot of driving an F1 car now is about managing tyres and learning to manage tyres, learning [that] the stuff that engineers bleat on about all the time is actually true.

"So he has to go out, he has to burn through a set of tyres and say ‘s**t, okay, now I know I can’t drive flat out’. It is those sort of things. He is learning, it is good."

Additional reporting by Jonathan Noble


http://www.motorsport.com/f1/news/strol ... ontent=www

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Gridlock
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Re: 2017 Williams Martini Racing Team - Mercedes

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LookBackTime wrote:"So he has to go out, he has to burn through a set of tyres and say ‘s**t, okay, now I know I can’t drive flat out’.
Welcome to the pinnacle of motorsport!
#58

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Mr Brooksy
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Re: 2017 Williams Martini Racing Team - Mercedes

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James Allen has said...
The British squad heads into 2017 with a lot of reshuffling going on behind the scenes. Its chief technical officer Pat Symonds will step down at the end of the year and a number of senior technical staff in the aerodynamic and production departments are also leaving. Mercedes’ technical chief, Paddy Lowe, has been tipped to join Williams next season.
Does anyone know who the other senior technical staff in the aero dept he is referring to?

James Key is still coming in '18, not now correct?

I hate these blanket statements, with no more info given. It's like saying "Manor is signing the biggest name in F1 and is expected to dominate." And that is all you get.
WilliamsF1 fan since 1989

Sevach
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Re: 2017 Williams Martini Racing Team - Mercedes

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Mr Brooksy wrote:James Allen has said...
The British squad heads into 2017 with a lot of reshuffling going on behind the scenes. Its chief technical officer Pat Symonds will step down at the end of the year and a number of senior technical staff in the aerodynamic and production departments are also leaving. Mercedes’ technical chief, Paddy Lowe, has been tipped to join Williams next season.
Does anyone know who the other senior technical staff in the aero dept he is referring to?

James Key is still coming in '18, not now correct?

I hate these blanket statements, with no more info given. It's like saying "Manor is signing the biggest name in F1 and is expected to dominate." And that is all you get.
There have been rumours about Dirk De Beer, Ferrari aero chief formerly of Lotus (aka he's an Allisson guy), Williams was interested in him since before he went to Ferrari.

The James Key rumour was always for 18 when his contract ends.

LookBackTime
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Re: 2017 Williams Martini Racing Team - Mercedes

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2017 F1 car designs "very immature" - Williams

http://www.motorsport.com/f1/news/2017- ... ms-858775/

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ME4ME
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Re: 2017 Williams Martini Racing Team - Mercedes

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From an earlier article: (2016-11-23)
"We only got the windtunnel tyres at the end of February, so it has been quite a short gestation period compared to the 2009 cars," he said. "I think we were working on the 2009 cars a lot longer.

"Plus, the big difference in 2009 was that we were running wind tunnels 24/7, and Toyota were running two wind tunnels 24/7. Now every single team, whether you are Haas or Manor or Mercedes, you do 65 runs a week.

"That does make things a little bit different to 2009. It also means that if someone has made a breakthrough it is harder to catch up."
http://www.motorsport.com/f1/news/f1-20 ... &q=symonds

From the new one: (2016-12-28)
"If you go back to 2009, a huge change, but we were talking about it for ages and there were drafts of the rules being pushed around and we were running wind tunnels 24/7 Toyota were running two wind tunnels 24/7. Plenty of time to investigate it.

"The next reasonably large change we had was for 2014, where we had a number of aerodynamic changes plus a lot of new cooling stuff to do and things like that. By that time, we still had a fair amount of time to do it, but we were running at 80 runs a week at that stage.

"This time we got our wind tunnel tyres in late February, so that is when we really started wind tunnel testing. Of course we were doing CFD before that and to be honest, we were doing a little bit of tunnel testing using rear tyres on the front and trying to get some idea of what the basic flow regime was.
http://www.motorsport.com/f1/news/2017- ... ms-858775/

Only a very small part is actually new information.

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