Team: Toto Wolff (Executive Director), James Allison (Technical Director), Andy Cowell (Executive Director of Mercedes AMG Powertrains), Aldo Costa (Technical advisor), Mike Elliot (Technology Director), Mark Ellis (PD), Geoffrey Willis (Director of Digital Engineering Transformation), Ron Meadows (SD), Andrew Shovlin (Trackside Engineering Director), Simon Cole (CTE), Matthew Deane (CM), Loic Serra (HVD), John Owen (CD), Ashley Way (DCD), Rob Thomas (COO), Loic Serra (Performance Director) Drivers: Lewis Hamilton (44), Valtteri Bottas (77), Stoffel Vandoorne (reserve), Esteban Gutierrez (reserve) Team name: Mercedes AMG F1 Petronas Major partners: Petronas, Ineos, UBS, Epson, Bose, Tommy Hilfiger, IWS Schaffhausen, Hewlet Packard, Pure Storage, Crowdstrike, Tibco, AMD
A place to discuss the characteristics of the cars in Formula One, both current as well as historical. Laptimes, driver worshipping and team chatter does not belong here.
I'm well aware, but generally it isn't as visually obvious. This combination of track and setup led to a very very visible difference in wear patterns, far far more than evident in any photos from other race meetings.
Biggest surprise here is the difference in wear between left and right. Particularly in the front.
All circuits will tend to wear one side more than the other as they have more left or right corners - Turkey has more left handers than right handers I think. T8, being a long left hander, will especially wear the right hand tyres more than the left.
I think it was just a peculiarity of them running the tyres much further until they were much more slick than we would normally expect of an inter. When looking at slicks, the wear is often more one side than the other but it is more difficult to see - it's also not normally looked for because it's not an unusual thing in the way that wearing the inters down on purpose was. Also, on slicks, the deliberate picking up of marbles on the cool down lap tends to hide some of the clues about wear.
Turbo says "Dumpster sounds so much more classy. It's the diamond of the cesspools." oh, and "The Dutch fans are drunk. Maybe"
I'm too lazy to upload pictures, but just wanted to point out that today on VB's pole lap, on the middle section of his dash, underneath the gear and the Strat setting (which is purple for qualifying, Strat 2), it was showing him the current state state of ERS deployment. I think that box used to be allocated for the actual HPP mode (it's the one that would change when they were pressing the OT button in race trim or when they were using Strat 2 in Q2 with medium tires but no party mode yet).
Anyways, you can see the exact moment when it switches from presumably free load (purple) to H-to-K (blue) to no-deployment (white) during each phase of the acceleration.
I've just read an article from "The Race" regarding Russel's struggles to keep pace with Valtteri at turn one, and I found this part really interesting: "It did it (creating more downforce volume between the tires and the diffuser) by mounting the lower leg of the rear wishbone into the crash structure, rather than the gearbox ahead of it. This allowed the whole suspension to be swept back. It was a massive engineering challenge. What that gave was a car with rear tires that would no longer be overwhelmed by a super-positive front end set-up. The car could be hustled into slow corners, late and positive on turn-in, without the rear becoming upset."
Apart from the fact that it's not something newly discovered, with the expression "super positive front end set-up", what do they precisely mean?
I've just read an article from "The Race" regarding Russel's struggles to keep pace with Valtteri at turn one, and I found this part really interesting: "It did it (creating more downforce volume between the tires and the diffuser) by mounting the lower leg of the rear wishbone into the crash structure, rather than the gearbox ahead of it. This allowed the whole suspension to be swept back. It was a massive engineering challenge. What that gave was a car with rear tires that would no longer be overwhelmed by a super-positive front end set-up. The car could be hustled into slow corners, late and positive on turn-in, without the rear becoming upset."
Apart from the fact that it's not something newly discovered, with the expression "super positive front end set-up", what do they precisely mean?
Lots of front-end mechanical grip, lots of steering.
"Stupid people do stupid things. Smart people outsmart each other, then themselves."
- Serj Tankian
Lots of front-end mechanical grip, lots of steering.
This also explains why last year's Merc was so good at low-speed corners but a bit "lazy" at the exit of them, doesn't it?
Although, at present, it seems to have been brilliantly solved.
