FoxHound wrote:Okay, so you feel the team is a joke and worthy of a few jokes. Everyone can have a laugh at certain teams now and again, but can you in bullet point form, sans pseudonyms, why they are laughable?
Although this has been covered extensively, I'd be delighted. (But, I don't do so well with bullet points.)
SeijaKessen wrote:[...]
"Mercedes team principal Ross Brawn told AUTOSPORT that the outfit had perhaps neglected car development too much recently."
[...]
Ross Brawn wrote:We suffer from mid-corner understeer and we can't dial out that understeer because we then have [corner] entrance and exit issues. But it's almost a classic racing car problem because when you reach the limit of the car it behaves in a certain way. The range of balance in the car is probably too great at the moment and that could be improved by the aerodynamic or mechanical side and we are working on both aspects to improve the car.
Three technical directors created a car which they've not properly developed and cannot be balanced. That's laughable, especially when one considers the money spent to do it. The W03 is the
third Mercedes F1 effort to be so fundamentally flawed.
Norbert Haug, a journalist, readily persuaded Mercedes to purchase a team that, throughout most of its existence, underperformed annually. Its only success was either a million years ago (the beginning of the Tyrrell era), the result of attrition and rain (Honda: Hungary, 2006), or the inevitable probability that one team would initially pick most of the low-lying fruit that grows from a massive regulation shift (Brawn, 2009), and even then, that team fell heavy, like a hammer through a room, once in-season development became a factor. In other words, Haug constructed a narrative that somehow convinced Dr. Dieter Zetsche to unload hundreds of millions to fill an automotive and competitive black hole. I think that's hysterical.
Now the most self-destructive team in F1 is rumored to be pursuing one of the most self-destructive drivers in F1. While that's obviously little more than a rumor at this point, given everything else, it doesn't seem so silly to imagine such a confounding move actually happening. (Full disclosure: I've said many times that a Hamilton-to-Mercedes move could make a ----ton of sense if it works. But, it's extremely high risk no matter how you cut it.)
Just imagining the infighting that could occur under such a scenario prompts my side to spontaneously split in preparation for the inevitable Vesuvius of humor that will erupt.
These things are to be expected from teams further down the grid. But, the Silver Arrow? Germans are notorious for precision, but I'm not quite so sure anyone at Mercedes AMG Petronas could precisely direct me to a toilet.
High comedy, my friend. All of it.
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