Williams
t feels like aeons have passed since we were nestled in the Barcelona media centre, mouths agape with surprise as Lewis Hamilton pulled the steering wheel of his box-fresh Mercedes W11 towards him.
As he did so while exiting the final corner, the front wheels pointed inwards by a few degrees, before returning to their regular position as Hamilton pushed the wheel back in. What was known within Mercedes’ own circles as DAS – or dual-axis steering – gave the team a way to run more toe out in the corners to boost cornering grip, while being able to turn the toe angle in to limit drag on the straights. Who says Formula 1 is too restrictive?
As the Nobel Prize-winning economist Bengt Holmstrom once opined: “The thinking is that creativity springs from freedom. That’s a fundamental misunderstanding. Creativity is born from challenges, limitations and questions.”
Iin that instance, saw the limitations posed by the regulations and, challenged by the FIA, managed to question the common convention of a steering wheel and use it to make changes to the car’s set-up on the fly. It was definitely creative. But innovative gains can be fleeting, and Mercedes will have one shot at determining the merits of DAS before it becomes outlawed by the FIA.
In F1’s coronavirus-enforced hiatus, Mercedes will surely have found some time to fine-tune the system around its more philanthropic endeavours within the ‘Project Pitlane’ group, in which the seven Uk-based F1 teams joined forces to build ventilators for hospitals. Ferrari, too, was involved in producing medical equipment over the pause.
All F1 teams have also had to shut down their factories for 63 consecutive days but, around that, have had extra time to pore through testing data and consider changes to their 2020 cars, which are still yet to be raced in anger. That said, the financial implications and uncertainty of a pandemic mean that some teams will have upgrades in the pipeline but need
Mercedes raised eyebrows to new heights with unlikelyto-be-copied DAS wizardry
to be assured of finances to complete them.
That uncertainty extends to suppliers, and it’s not inconceivable that the smaller operators entwined with F1’s cast of teams had to press pause on their own operations and push back any production until lockdown measures were wound down. It’s been a difficult time for all, but with racing back on the menu there should be some signs of green shoots. squarer construction Pirelli had developed for this year, the 2019 tyres will begin to deal with aero loads that they weren’t designed for. Rather than force Pirelli to up the tyre pressures even further, F1 has instead decided to cut a triangular section out of the floor to inhibit all of the cuts and slots that permeate the current floors’ edges.
Those slots assist the diffuser by encouraging air to pass around the rear tyre, limiting the amount of turbulence that it ‘squirts’ into the diffuser and reducing its effectiveness – so removing them will cut about 10% of the cars’ downforce.
Although teams will be allowed to make small aero changes throughout 2020 and over the off-season, the gains they make will still fall within the working range of load that the Pirellis can handle – so it’s a sensible, if rudimentary, measure.
Other changes can be made depending on the FIA’S approval, as has also been granted permission to make the tweaks needed to accommodate its switch to Mercedes powerplants next season.
The general design freeze will be a pleasing scenario for some, particularly those who impressed in pre-season testing, but it could be a double-edged sword.
With 2020’s cars originally designed for just one season
before the rules were supposed to change, they now have to stay the course – and so each team’s respective engineers will have to hope that their machinery has enough growing room for two years, rather than just one.
This could hinder which drew a lot of attention during testing thanks to its distinctly Mercedes-flavoured RP20. Although quick around Barcelona, with both Sergio Perez and Lance Stroll bothering the upper reaches of the timing boards, there are questions about the amount of development that the car can field before the rewards tail off significantly. Technical director Andrew Green, while fielding questions about Racing Point’s new car during pre-season testing, had not suggested that too many developments were in the pipeline for 2020, but that was before the team had grasped the potential of its new chariot.
But in April, while speaking to Autosport following F1’s decision to stick with the current cars for another year, Green explained that the team hadn’t planned concrete developments in case the pejoratively dubbed ‘Pink Mercedes’ hadn’t managed to live up to the team’s hopes.
“It’s just at the time we were weighing up the risk of what happens if we fail,” Green said. “If we fail to do this, if we stop what we’re doing, go down a different road and we don’t recover the performance and we end up with a car that’s actually slower than we had last year. And the thinking at the time was, ‘Well, it’ll only be for one year, because we’re gonna have to scrap it anyway.’
“That scenario, as far as I can see, didn’t materialise. So, for us now, we exceeded the performance of last year’s car with the new car. So, we’re not concerned about running it for effectively 18 months.”
Perhaps there are also questions emerging at too. The SF1000 appeared to be troubled during testing, and it looked as though the engine had been pegged back following the fallout from the FIA’S investigation of its power unit. There’s always the chance that Ferrari was playing with sandbags but, if the 2020 car does indeed turn out to be something of a lemon, Charles Leclerc will have to spend two years rather than one attempting to corral it into some semblance of dignified results. And a penny for the Maranellobound Carlos Sainz Jr’s thoughts if the Ferrari does indeed emerge to be lacking in the pace department for two straight seasons.