Mercedes AMGW04

[Eat Sleep Watch F1 Repeat]

Most teams bring a Monaco package, it's the same with Spa and Monza. Seems strange that they would bring this revised rear suspension however, knowing that they tyres will change in Canada. Unless they feel that they will still suffer as badly as in previous races.

 

[u408379965]

From Canada the changes to the rear tyres whilst leaving the fronts more or less alone should help the rear limited Mercedes, but in F1 nothing is as simple as it seems.

Is this true? I thought Pirelli were buckling to Red Bull, who are having problems with the fronts not the rears.

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I do worry about teams bringing updates to Monaco though, as circuits go its pretty specialist with 1 off problems!

As long as they don't dismiss an upgrade for future races because it doesn't work at Monaco it doesn't really matter.

Autosport+ article on Rosberg that might as well go here:




Rosberg proves his worth

Tyre wear isn't the only storyline at Mercedes this season. Many expected Hamilton to easily overshadow Rosberg, but the German is more than holding his own. Edd Straw analyses the form

"Nico was just quicker today." Lewis Hamilton's verdict after seeing team-mate and old friend Nico Rosberg claim pole position for the second consecutive race was as direct as it was accurate. During the Spanish Grand Prix weekend, there was no argument about who the lead Mercedes driver was either on qualifying or race performance. Since bagging his first pole following the high-profile switch to Mercedes in China, Hamilton has watched his old friend take back-to-back pole positions. This is an unusual situation for a driver whose career qualifying record versus his team-mates reads 82-33 in Hamilton's favour. Only a fool would attempt to argue Rosberg's superiority based on a sample set of two weekends, especially as Hamilton outqualified him during the first three race weekends.

What really matters is that Rosberg, in his eighth season of grand prix racing, has stacked up well compared to his world champion team-mate. For a driver whose career to date has been inconclusive, thanks in part to circumstances outside of his control, that is big news. Mercedes motorsport has often talked about Hamilton's arrival creating a "no excuses" environment for the team. The same applies to Rosberg. Rarely has a driver so consistently beaten team-mates over the years yet been unable to convince the world of his quality. Rosberg came into the 2013 season a grand prix winner and no one would claim he wasn't a fine driver, but since showing well compared to Mark Webber in his rookie season at Williams in '06, his team-mates have been imprecise yardsticks for ascertaining just how good he is. Thrashing Kazuki Nakajima, who wasn't as bad as remembered but was a poor performer, defeating the effective but unspectacular Alex Wurz, and comfortably outscoring comeback-specification Michael Schumacher for three seasons is all well and good, but Hamilton is a very different benchmark. Rosberg, now a 27-year-old with 133 grand prix starts under his belt, is very well aware of this. Ever since Mercedes signed Hamilton, he has talked of relishing the comparison. "That is the thing I really enjoy about the sport – the competition, the challenge," says Rosberg. "That is why it was great to have Michael Schumacher as a team-mate, a great experience for me and I was glad to have beaten him three years in a row. "Now there is a new challenge with Lewis. It's fresh air in the team and having him [makes me] question myself, adapt and improve."

Drivers always talk about how much they can learn from what their team-mates are doing. Few of them are capable of doing so. But Rosberg is unquestionably one of them, for he is arguably one of the most intelligent drivers on the grid. That might come as a surprise for those who buy into the 'pretty boy' image he was lumbered with – not to mention the 'Britney' moniker he has never been able to shake off – from his early days in F1. While the Schumacher he partnered from 2010-12 was not quite the great driver of old, he was still a very effective one with a set of working practices that Rosberg will have learned a lot from. He is also eminently capable of driving home the inherent advantage over Hamilton of having three years at Mercedes under his belt. There is no doubt that Rosberg is a quick and very technically correct driver – just watch the onboard footage of his Barcelona pole lap for proof of that – but his cerebral approach is central to his recent success. In Bahrain, this was critical. There, Rosberg was cautious, albeit not slow, in the first sector and was able to nail sectors two and three. This added up to an advantage of over four tenths over Hamilton. Of course, in the race the situation was reversed, with Hamilton coming through to fifth and Rosberg fading to ninth as both battled the tyres.

But on the evidence of the Spanish GP weekend, Rosberg had learned from this and managed to maintain his pole position form while mitigating the tyre use problems in the race to take sixth. It's important to note that Hamilton does have over twice the points of Rosberg (50 to 22), but this isn't about arguing that the German is a better driver. The relative merits of the two can only be accurately assessed once we have a full campaign of races to pick over the bones of. But the fact that Rosberg has made his presence felt proves that the intra-Mercedes driver battle will be worth following closely. Last year, in the wake of Hamilton's deal with Mercedes, AUTOSPORT ran a feature entitled 'F1's invisible man has something to prove'. Rosberg has been anything but invisible this season. That can only be good news for Mercedes, as Ross Brawn points out. He certainly believes that Rosberg and Hamilton will continue to cross each other's path on track this season, just as they did in Malaysia where Rosberg was ordered to hold station behind his team-mate.

"With any drivers, you need the pace, you need the speed because without that you are not going to succeed," says Brawn. "So the first thing any top Formula 1 driver needs is the pace. Then you need an intelligent approach, then you need to get both drivers working in harmony trying to improve the car and the way the team works. Then you have got an ideal situation. Our drivers get on well, they have raced together before, they have a nice history together. We all know there will be events or incidents in which they will get angry with each other. That's natural - they are competitors and it is just important that we recover from those very quickly and don't allow them to become damaging. They work very well together as team-mates, they want to beat each other and they are very, very quick. It's a great combination."

On the evidence of the season so far, it's hard to argue with that. It's too early to draw any definitive conclusions, but Rosberg has proved he has what it takes to compete in the same ballpark as Hamilton and give his world champion team-mate plenty to think about. It will be fascinating to see how the Rosberg v Hamilton battle develops from here

 

[BrightLampShade]

From what I've read AG both fronts and backs are changing but the overriding effect is to reduce delaminations. The almost side effect of this is to help rear limited cars due to the greater give in sidewalls and inner belt.

The profiles should be identical so the only aero changes depend on how much the tyres demorm under load.

 

[cosicave]

Shouldn't this topic be being covered in the Tyres thread? I'm easily confused you know!

Anyway, my understanding is that it is only the rears which will change; probably reverting to something very similar to 2012 spec'. As far as I'm aware, the re-profiled fronts will remain the same. This may cause teams to struggle to find a balance and will involve long hours in the simulators for the test-drivers because of course, this combination has never been tested.

I must say, I think it's a bit unfair on all those teams which did a better job with what they were given. As I've said elsewhere, such a dramatic change mid-season is unprecedented; and the lack of real testing (non-sim) more than doubles the headache.

 

[JonnyBaws]

Jon Noble ‏@NobleF1 4m

Paddy Lowe will join Mercedes next month, after being given early release from McLaren contract. Full story soon

Surely too late to help with 2013 car.. but just in time to make a big impact on the 2014 challenger?

 

[JonnyBaws]

Link to story...
http://www.autosport.com/news/report.php/id/107544

 

[El_Bando]

the garden will have to wait then

 

[u408379965]

McLaren has a contract for a supply of Mercedes engines for 2014, when the new formula comes in and the German manufacturer was very unhappy that Honda engineers would potentially have access to information about its 2014 hybrid turbo engines and would learn a great deal about them, which would help with its own preparations for 2015 entry. So it appears that they have leveraged this situation to trigger the early release of Lowe.

http://www.jamesallenonf1.com/2013/...rcedes-leverage-for-early-paddy-lowe-release/

I don't get this. McLaren have a contract with Mercedes, they also have a contract with Lowe. What can Mercedes do? They're unhappy about the situation. So? They have no leverage here at all, they have to supply McLaren whether they release Lowe or not. Bizarre decision by McLaren to let him go.

 

[BrightLampShade]

I guess it helps to keep Mercedes sweet. Mercedes could supply engines whilst still making things awkward for McLaren, its probably best for all parties in the end.

 

[BrightLampShade]

Revealed: The secret behind Mercedes getting on top of tyre issues

Kind of been discussed before but now theres a proper summary. I'm always a fan of seeing some clever yet simple engineering:

One of the defining stories of this 2013 F1 season has been the rise of Mercedes and the way they not only grabbed pole position in eight of the first 12 qualifying sessions (by getting the most out of the Pirelli tyres), but also got on top of heavy tyre wear issues in races to allow Rosberg to win twice and Hamilton once.

Analysis by former Williams chief engineer and JA on F1 technical adviser Mark Gillan of photos of Mercedes wheels, taken by leading F1 photographer Russell Batchelor of XPB Images, shows the complex internal design which Mercedes has evolved to master thermal management of the tyre. It is F1 innovation in action.

Mercedes’ steady improvement in tyre management in races has not happened without controversy, as they took part in a 1,000 Pirelli test in May which landed them in the FIA International Tribunal, where they were found to have breached the Sporting Regulations, but the Tribunal found that the breach had been made in “good faith” based on communications with the FIA.

Here is Mark Gillan’s analysis:

Background

Take a look at what the regulations say about wheels (at the bottom of this post).

As the wheels are easy for other teams to look at one is always very careful to ensure that their legality is crystal clear and if there are any ‘grey areas’ then one will run the idea past Charlie Whiting at the FIA to ensure that there are no problems. Whilst wheels are relatively inexpensive to manufacture (per item) the manufacturing lead times are relatively long and one typically needs 30+ sets of wheels (i.e. 120+ wheels) to remain operationally efficient at races so wheel upgrades during a season are not too common.

The Mercedes wheels in detail
In my experience conjecture about what a team is actually doing with a particular design is often wide of the mark.

What one can say is that to modify a wheel a team needs a good reason to do so because of the lead-times and quantities involved. As tyre thermal management has been a major performance differentiator this season all teams have been working on mechanisms/process to get the tyres into their operating temperature window as soon as possible and then keeping them in this window for as long as possible. The thermal window is quoted by Pirelli as typically 20C to 25C, with running temperatures of between 90C to 135C, depending on compound.

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Mercedes has been evolving what it does inside the wheels. Mercedes now has a new set of front and rear wheels which were captured very clearly in Monza by photographer Russell Batchelor. On the inner surface of the wheel there is a complex dimple pattern, which is actually fully integral to the wheel itself and almost certainly there solely for thermal management purposes in order to get and keep the tyres within their optimal temperature window.

This complex dimpled and scalloped pattern (see close up of the front tyre, below) is not straightforward to manufacture and therefore indicates a lot of research and development has gone into developing this component and proving its benefit before committing to its manufacture.

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This type of pattern is quite common on modern heatsink designs, where dimples have been shown to give up to 25 to 30% thermal transfer improvements over the smooth surface variant. Only Mercedes will know whether the effort was worthwhile and how good the correlation was to their simulation and rig programme, but one has to applaud their ingenuity and effort.

What the F1 regulations say
Firstly, Article 12 of the 2013 Technical Regs determines what a team can/cannot do with the design of their wheels. The regulations are pretty prescriptive, but the main points can be summarised as:

i) Wheel must be made from a magnesium alloy (AZ 70 or 80);
ii) The width and diameter of the complete wheel (wheel and tyre) is specified within a range;
iii) The wheel minimum thickness is 3mm increasing to 4mm at the bead;
iv) The wheel must not be handed i.e. the left and right wheels on a given axle must be identical;
v) Surface treatments are only allowed for appearance and protection e.g. painted/clear coated to avoid corrosion and allow for livery schemes.
vi) One can then add to the wheel a limited number of items such as spacers, balance weights, tyre pressure and temperature monitoring systems, pegs etc