Mercedes GP - Inauguration and 1st season

[marcush.]

they still look for the right candidates...

http://www.mercedes-gp.com/en/#/category/recruitment/

[xpensive]

they still look for the right candidates...

http://www.mercedes-gp.com/en/#/category/recruitment/

A garage technician eh? Pretty much where RB himself started out and just look and behold where he's at now?

Sorry about that one marcush, but that position was such a giveaway...but now, that link of yours says Loic Bigois,
with a not xactly earth-moving track-record if I may say so, is "Head of aerodynamics" with MGP, whatever that might be.

But who is "Technical director" then and who is the hell are Russel Cooley and Kevin Taylor, sounds like gunslingers straight out of a Hollywood western flick if you ask me? The plot thickness...seg?

[segedunum]

Read up what happened AFTER Honda pulled the plug. There is your answer.

Pardon? We've been through that many, many, many times JET, but again, you repeat it as if we've all forgotten.

What happened was that Honda gave them a crapload of money, Jensen Button was paid off to the tune of 10 million, they ended up being the richest team around at the end of 2009 with a car with a significant head start...... There's no way I'd expect to be two seconds off the pace a few months later with a stable set of regulations. It's as simple as that.

......Bugger this, let's stay somewhat on topic..........

Against teams around them they've probably lost between two and four seconds per lap in time from last year to this relative to other teams now in front, around and behind them - with the same engine. That's shocking.

To continuosly post after post harp on about how bad they are really does bring your agenda in to perspective.

.......OK JET. There is nothing wrong at Mercedes, or you think there is nothing wrong. Leave it at that.

[JohnsonsEvilTwin]

Of course, Brawn GP in December 2008 through to November 2009 was such a lovely place to be. Nobody lost their jobs, that must have been PR gumph and the teams very existance was never under any threat.

Of course the exact opposite happened. Yet you keep saying they were the richest team on the grid when thats a proven fallacy.
They couldnt go into debt because they had no backers apart from the execs Brawn etc.
Hence why Hondas cash injection and the forwarding of TV money was allowed, to give the team money through to the end of the season.
If you know business, the team could not get an overdraft for millions slap bang in the middle of a recession.
Next best thing was Hondas Golden £100 million handshake and Bernies cash deal(which Williams vetoed incidentally). This allowed the team to gradually let people go and ease up spending over a period of time rather than an immediate cull.(even though 30% were let go immediatley).

Brawn has been over this so many times, I dont see why this is even up for debate.

[segedunum]

Take a look at the list of people above. They're all people who have been there since the BAR/Honda days. Like I've said many times, the core technical department was left untouched and that does nothing to tell us that it wasn't. Only £7.5 million was saved with staff reductions, and they certainly weren't 'key' people. There was never any reason to let people go, other than to squeeze out the bumper directors' payments.

Honda bankrolled the team until March and they were given £100 million which Honda probably felt was cheaper than the money they'd been throwing at it. Even then, they still had something like £141 million in revenue minus the Honda payment. £100 million came from 'other sources', but even if much of this was advanced TV money it is still money nonetheless. The team was never broke and never short of technical staff or resources. Hell, they bought out Button's contract to the tune of £10 million. On top of that the team had £60 million in cash sitting in the bank after 2009. Revenue easily exceeded costs with room to spare.

There is nothing there that suggested that the team was so cash-strapped and had lost so many technical people and resources that they would lose between two and four seconds per lap relative to the teams around them - and many teams who have smaller budgets at that. Nothing whatsoever.

Brawn side-stepped these little details completely.

[segedunum]

Technical director :Loic Bigois

Well, I would keep a low profile if I had a record like his. Prost wasn't exactly setting the world alight and he was part of that group at Williams in the BMW era that slowly flushed them down the toilet as they struggled terribly to compete with McLaren and Ferrari.

operations manager Gary Savage
design manager : Russell Cooley
chief designer:Kevin Taylor
designer: John Owen
Head engineering:Jacky Eeckeleart
Head of engineering/dynamics :Craig Wilson

As for the rest of them, I see no significant F1 experience there and they're not exactly associated with much long-term success. These guys are the same old BAR crew that struggled incessantly for years. If I was Ross Brawn I'd have been banging down the doors of Renault in particular, as well as taking a trick out of Mike Gascgoyne's book and lifting a few people from Force India. There is a Mercedes connection afterall. Resources and infrastructure obviously aren't the problems.

It goes back to the point made many moons ago. If they're going to avoid really returning to type in their past performance as a team, and they're pretty much back where they were, then they're going to need some people in key positions who have been associated with some success who can drag the rest of the team on.

[marcush.]

You know the guys ? I don´t ,I have to admit.
Each of them was World champion at least one time to call them no significant F1 experience is just not true,or is only 20 years in F1 significant?Force India has one year of decent results ,but nothing comparable to what BAR achieved in the pre honda years .Why should the people there be any better or more significantly experienced in F1,maybe because it is ex Jordan?
Bigois has led the designteam to the title so he got it right at least one time .Not many out there who can say that.

[xpensive]

With respect marcush, to carry the "WCC" tag just because you were part of the Brawn team during the DDD-fluke of 2009 is not entirey fair, it's like a certain Swedish ski-jumper winning the WC 20 years ago after he discvered the "V-style".

I'd be impressed and convinced of their capability if they were pinched by richer teams over said season, were they now?

[marcush.]

Exp ,it is a documented fact that Brawn had a DDD ,as did Williams and Toyota from the first race in 2009.those two teams did a decent rise but nothing like Brawn .
And quite soon after this all had something like this on their cars .As we have seen with blown difussers and f-ducts the top teams are quick in duplicating and adapting.

It is also a fact that Brawns Front wing design was the one most teams had to converge towards in the two years we have seen the new regs...so I´d say they had a lot of their aero well sorted already in 2009...
the Renault team is much applauded for their development but it is not much more than a combo of Toyota and Brawn of 2009 really...

Why their staff was not snapped up or lured away ...who knows..maybe Norby is paying good ?Or they are very happy to stay put? We cannot know.

[segedunum]

They managed to find a double diffuser and an outwashed front wing, the real secret to balancing the car (Red Bull had to make theirs flex), after probably a year of almost complete total and utter focus on that 2009 car. They did absolutely nothing else during 2008 but focus on those two main things and it probably took them months to find them. The Brawn of 2009 was possibly the most expensive Formula 1 car ever - and it had two definitive features that made it fast. That was it. Now look at how long it took Red Bull to implement a flexible wing and an exhaust diffuser system during last winter, retrofitting the double diffuser and retrofitting a F-duct system that doesn't magically switch itself on and ask yourself who's gaining the most.

The 2009 Brawn being fast and ending up as a championship winning car is really not the problem Marcush. The problem is the disproportionate amount of time and effort it took to get those two features on the car and how they completely failed to keep their advantage through 2009 as other teams caught up.

That track record is not unusual for this team and this exact group of people. Honda looked to be making progress to the point where they were getting some pole positions and their first race win in 2006 after years of total frustration. They then sank like a brick. The moderate rise coincided with an experienced person in Geoff Willis working for many years until some favourable results were achieved and the very sharp fall with him being shoved out in favour of, not one but two, people who were completely unsuitable and inexperienced - as 2007 and 2008 showed.

Are you seeing a pattern yet?

[JohnsonsEvilTwin]

The team won in 2009 WDC and WCC.

When last did Mclaren do that? 12 years ago!
So the team had the Diffuser and the outwash front wing, these arent just 2 elements, the are 2 of the most important elements on a car, especially through regulation change.
Only 3 teams can say they caught up and did more this year. RB, Ferrari and McLaren.

Where is the justifaction in crucifying them? There is none.

Hire and Fire Mentality went out with huge mobile phones and naff suits.

[JohnsonsEvilTwin]

"You always reap what you sewed the year before in terms of car design and performance," he says. "It's fair to say that in 2009, our priority was obviously to establish the long-term future of the company and win the championships. There was very little capacity to develop the future car.

"We were also going through a pretty major reorganisation that year. In March/April, we had to make 300 people redundant and that also meant that our structure probably wasn't optimised around the size that we were.

"What we've been doing since is to build the structure for the future. We've paid the price for the circumstances that we have been in and I think that it was probably predictable. A lot more time, effort and planning is going into next year's car."

The final stages of that reorganisation are still being completed, with race engineers Jock Clear and Andrew Shovlin set to take senior engineering roles and Tony Ross and Mark Slade recruited from Williams and Renault respectively to work with Rosberg and Schumacher.

"There will be some changes on the race team engineering wise this year," Brawn explained. "It's about developing the people that we have and other people will be given an opportunity. I consider the changes very natural – although I have no problems with the engineering team. I just want to strengthen other areas of the company as we have other areas related to racing that we are putting a massive effort into."

Ross Brawn

[segedunum]

That team and many of the personnel in it have been around since 1998. How often have they been at the front and won races in that time with the kind of investment they've had available? You'd expect more than 2009's results if you'd had as much investment as they've had over that timeframe. Having a group of people together for that length of time and getting rid of them for amassing relatively poor results given the resources of the team is not hiring and firing. You can't develop people who consistently struggle to keep their heads above water.

I see we're also back to quoting Ross Brawn as if that somehow furthers independent discussion and an impartial perspective. We've already been through much of Ross Brawn's ass-covering previously. You're talking to yourself there JET. Keep posting it if you like to read it and it makes you feel better.

[JohnsonsEvilTwin]

Seems you cannot believe a word Brawn says, and you give not ONE valid reason why.
Its his baby, he knows whats going on...Why should we not believe him over your tripe?

[Intego]

Aaaaand FIGHT!