Mercedes AMG F1 Team 2012

[yener]

excuse me but Schumacher did not enjoy clean races and I don´t know if Schumnacher would have experienced the same fate as Rosberg if he did not have that gearbox or the coming together with grosjean..
to me the car simply suits michaels driving better because it responds to being pushed when it was just giving up on being squeezed in2010 and 11.
so being precise and NOT over 100% rewarded Rosberg until now but now it´s the opposite the car does not work this way anymore.
paralells to Ferrari when Massa could not make the hard tyres work when alonso was able to push push push .

Comon Marcush!
Everybody saw how Michael was getting under pressure by Vettel! Even when Vettel got in the gras by a mistake and lost around 3 seconds he managed to close that gap in 5 laps!
The racepace is bad. I am a huge MS fan, but we all must be realistic and not take conclussions so early.

[Maelstrom]

excuse me but Schumacher did not enjoy clean races and I don´t know if Schumnacher would have experienced the same fate as Rosberg if he did not have that gearbox or the coming together with grosjean..
to me the car simply suits michaels driving better because it responds to being pushed when it was just giving up on being squeezed in2010 and 11.
so being precise and NOT over 100% rewarded Rosberg until now but now it´s the opposite the car does not work this way anymore.
paralells to Ferrari when Massa could not make the hard tyres work when alonso was able to push push push .

Whether Schumacher would have done better is speculation for now. We can find out more in China. What is quite obvious is that tyres were causing them BOTH problems and they both were quick in qualifying while lacking race pace.

Perhaps you may be right and it might turn out that this car suits Michael more. That doesn't mean they did it to suit him more and might simply mean that it was the consequences of no more EBD.

[xpensive]

+1 still Mercedes wants Schumacher to win as this would be the same as holding the key to fort knox in terms of marketing value..

It would indeed seem the logical reason for luring him out of retirement in the first place, wouldn't it?

[marcush.]

germans are germans and they can be quite stubborn in holding on to an idea....

[oldtony]

It is the simple trade off between downforce and drag.
Look at the trap times and sector times and you will see that the AMG Merc is quick in a straight line due to less drag, but slower in the lower to medium pace corners due to less downforce. Less downforce means higher tyre degredation.
Given the free use of the DRS in qually the straight line benefit is magnified and they look good, under race conditions the tyre degredation sets in more quickly.
The introduction of DRS has led to a tactical conundrum for teams, and it seems to have caught up with Adrian at RBR. With the car behind having the use of DRS you need a "slippery" car to defend in the DRS zones which means a trade off of downforce for less drag. This year with the modified rear wing McLaren seem to have got the trade off right.
Now the mystery is how do Sauber manage to get comparatively low drag but still look after the tyres? Any suggestions?

[Maelstrom]

Well I can tell that if Schumacher manages to outperform Rosberg this year we are going to have some lovely threads yelling about Rosberg being given a bad deal.

It's amazing how many opinions are formed when there is no real proof, and even more ironic since this is a technical forum.

[raymondu999]

It's amazing how many opinions are formed when there is no real proof, and even more ironic since this is a technical forum.

Welcome to F1T

[ArchAngel]

Surprisingly, technical forums can attract a lot of stubborn & strongly opinionated people whose sole objective is to preach their perceptions as absolute truths, rather than to discuss, share & learn.

Back on topic, I certainly hope that in the 3 weeks before China, everyone in the team & factory are burning the midnight candles and working hard their wind-tunnels, CFD stations, simulators, super-computers & biological neural networks in order to solve the riddle of the W03-&-Pirelli partnership.

[raymondu999]

Don't the computers have a set amount of performance which they are allowed to use under the RRA? Measured in FLOPS I believe.

[Pierce89]

Don't the computers have a set amount of performance which they are allowed to use under the RRA? Measured in FLOPS I believe.

It's a balance between 60(possibly reduced to 40) hrs of windtunnel time vs 60 teraflops of cfd per week. I'm not sure if 1 hr WT time is directly exchangeable for 1 teraflop of cfd, but it is a weekly balance of the two.

[Pierce89]

Fact is, a car that can challenge for top 3 spots in qualifying can't be a complete dog.

Does the same logic apply to a car that wins a race?

[raymondu999]

Don't the computers have a set amount of performance which they are allowed to use under the RRA? Measured in FLOPS I believe.

It's a balance between 60(possibly reduced to 40) hrs of windtunnel time vs 60 teraflops of cfd per week. I'm not sure if 1 hr WT time is directly exchangeable for 1 teraflop of cfd, but it is a weekly balance of the two.

Oh so there is a weekly limit? ie teams cannot lump all their CFD and windtunnel of the season at the start? They can only put out a set amount each week? I think there's an exchange rate. Something like 24 hours of windtunnel for 10 teraflops? Or somesuch. IIRC 24 hours of windtunnel time is exchangeable with a straightline test day.

[ArchAngel]

Dunno about the specifics of RRA-imposed quota on MiPS & FLOPS, but given the cold, hard & unyielding fact represented by 1 point in 2 races, the W03 does currently seem to be something of a FLOP.

Can the teams sell/trade wind-tunnel & CFD allocation units among themselves? ...Like say, carbon credits?

[ubrben]

Seems clear that they can run unlimited DRS in Q so they get a bigger advantage like RBR did with their blown diffuser Q engine maps. Then race pace is slower because of the single DRS zone in the race.

Are we sure they have less downforce? Surely with the DRS/F-Duct they can run more downforce and still qualify up front.

If you have less downforce then you run higher slip angles and put more energy into the tyres - but that effect is much smaller on slow speed circuits where you don't have the downforce increasing cornering stiffness. Hence why I'm not totally convinced that's all of the issue as Melbourne is quite low speed.

The other aspect is mechanical setups and how much energy the damper's putting into the tyre. I've got no data to support that, but likewise there's no data to automatically assume they have low downforce.

Ben

[ubrben]

Now the mystery is how do Sauber manage to get comparatively low drag but still look after the tyres? Any suggestions?

Like I said the dampers can have a massive effect, but no-one can see them so they don't get talked about.

I've had a car running 18" low aspect ratio slicks have 80% of the suspension deflection in the tyre. The same chasssis and tyres with different dampers put only 45% of the deflection in the tyre and had much better consistency and less graining as a result when we back-to-backed the dampers at a track test with the same driver and wing level.

That was a car with a single spring damper per corner plus bump rubbers and packers. No third elements or inerters, etc... Once you have all that, the potential to do bad things to the tyres increases massively. Especially if you're working in the aero-myopic world of F1.

Ben