THE MERCEDES W10: WILL YOU RACE IT? NO YOU WON’T
Think you know everything about the championship-winning Mercedes W10? Think again. The car pictured here is not what it seems – and demonstrates the depth and confidence that makes Mercedes a serial winner.
At first glance you may think the car pictured on this page is the 2019 championship-winning Mercedes W10. It’s not. This car never raced. Its own designers barely remember signing it off. And yet it played a fundamental role in Mercedes’ sixth consecutive drivers’ and constructors’ title doubles. Such is the way of modern Formula 1.
Think back to the beginning of the year and the first rush of excitement as the latest crop of cars hit the track for pre-season testing in Barcelona. Interest naturally spikes during launch season, more so in years such as this in which the rules have changed. Large-scale technical shake-ups often mix up the on-track order so the stakes were high… and Mercedes was nowhere on the timesheets in the first week. Ferrari, with its markedly different solution to the new front-wing rules, seemed to be flying.
“You always know that you want to update the car as late as possible,” says Mercedes chief designer John Owen. “One of the things that affects you a bit if you update it late is that if you’re busy pushing a car out for the first test, the second test is only a week later. So, the problem you get into is that from a production point of view you’re trying to make two cars at the same time.
“What we would normally do in those circumstances is focus entirely on what we’re taking to the second test in aerodynamic terms, and then take just any old snapshot of where the car was in the development phase, much earlier than normal, just so we can have a set of bodywork so we can run the car at the first test.”
Negative feedback from the drivers of the W10 in those early days added weight to the suggestion that Mercedes was in trouble. When the second test began a handful of days later, the silver cars looked very different – and ultimately proved to be much faster. Some speculated that an accelerated development programme had been put into place to transform the W10 overnight.
But even with Mercedes’ prodigious resources this was an absurd suggestion. More plausible was the theory circulating within the paddock that Mercedes had been pursuing parallel design programmes, much as it had during its previous incarnation as Honda in 2008, when it threw everything it had at the car that would become the championship-winning Brawn BGP001.
The truth is a little more prosaic. As Owen says, it’s standard F1 practice to approach the first test of the season with a very basic car build, based on an early spec. For 2019, the new front wing regulations had been published in an immature and loophole-riddled state, and then finessed via a series of FIA clarifications over the following six months. That presented the teams with development challenges, which manifested themselves during ‘launch week’ before the first test: Renault, for instance, ‘launched’ what it admitted was a 2018 car with different front and rear wings, while Williams didn’t have its car ready until mid-way through the first test (and even then it was declared illegal).
With hindsight, Mercedes’ tactic of rolling out that early ‘snapshot’ of the W10 to maximise track time and prove out the mechanical fundamentals was correct. It enjoyed peerless (if not perfect) reliability throughout the season and a relatively straight trajectory of aero development. After being fast out of the box in testing, Ferrari found its very different front-end philosophy carried inherent limitations that took until Singapore to debug. Red Bull was struggling until an Austrian GP update transformed the RB15. Renault pinned its hopes on a French GP upgrade package which didn’t work, resulting in yet another technical restructure at Enstone.
“The car that went to the first test was never, ever intended to race, from the moment it went to manufacture,” adds Owen. “Anything that looks like we were on the back foot, or reacting, is absolutely not true.
“We never had any plans to race it and we were a bit surprised that some of the other teams – one in particular – got themselves quite buoyed by the idea we weren’t any good. It surprised me because it seemed a bit naïve in the sense that this wasn’t going to be the car we were bringing [to the races].
“That first test is all about understanding, and
teething out any troubles. Are your suspension geometries correct? What about the new tyres? How is the new power unit running? Are there any issues with the braking system? You’re really just focusing around getting a working race car. It’s not focused around performance.
“Our plan was always that we were going to add the aero kit at the second test. We actually found it quite amusing to read what people were writing about our aero [after the first test] because, to be honest, we couldn’t even remember what it looked like until it showed up on the car. We’d moved on so much since then.
“And then we found it even more amusing when people were saying we’d reacted in the second week to what happened in the first – which would have been a miracle. Our [real] car was always going to come to the second test, and during that we didn’t show its full speed
– a little bit intentionally, and also through a number of things not all happening together on the same day. We knew there was a lot of speed in the car but we weren’t confident we were the fastest team, even in the second test when the timesheets were some way short of what we knew we could do.”
One of the defining characteristics of the 2019 season, even before a single car turned a wheel, was the rather slipshod introduction of the new front-wing regulations. Against a background of ongoing wrangling over wider changes coming for 2021, these were rushed through as a sort of half-way house to evaluate whether it was possible to reduce aerodynamic ‘outwash’ and enable cars to get close to one another without losing aero performance. Floated as a concept by FIA president Jean Todt after a rather uneventful 2018 Australian Grand Prix, they were ratified by e-vote within two months after a brief consultation period.
Although teams were invited to interrogate and feed back on the proposals using their research facilities, many were so sceptical about these rules ever coming into being that they simply didn’t bother with what they saw as a waste of resource. Equally, though, they didn’t want to be seen to stand in the way of measures that were claimed to be beneficial to the spectacle. Both Ferrari and Mercedes supported the proposals and they were duly enshrined in the rulebook in late May.
“We found it even more amusing when people were saying we’d reacted in the second week to what happened in the first – which would have been a miracle. Our [real] car was always going to come to the second test, and during that we didn’t show its full speed – a little bit intentionally”
JOHN OWEN
“I’m not sure we were convinced they would make a lot of difference,” says Owen, “but equally we couldn’t say they wouldn’t, so we got on with it. The thing with these rules is that while they were, perhaps in media terms, pushed through quite early, the subtleties of those rules took a long time to work out. Months and months. We were even having changes in November.
“That made quite a big difference on how much you push the development of certain – I wouldn’t call them ‘loopholes’, but there were interpretations of the new front wing rules, and you had to be cautious to develop those because of the likelihood of them being closed down. Some of them were, some of them remained.
“The front brake ducts were also part of this big change and it was very difficult to get them to work. There were lots of questions from all the teams. It’s quite tricky during times like that when you’re working to what you think the rules will become, rather than what the rules are. But it was the same for everyone. We initially worked on the things we were certain would remain as they were, then as it became more crystallised in terms of the final wording we could move our focus onto the detail.”
In common with several other teams, Mercedes had to park some of the more ambitious ideas it had planned for the W10. While the scope of the changes might seem fairly limited, the front wing and associated furniture dictates the aero ‘map’ of the entire car.
Owen says Mercedes’ initial simulations indicated a loss of 2.5s a lap. Clawing that back took precedence over trying to find tenths of a second in small areas all over the car.
This also accounts for the W10 carrying over so much from the W09 in terms of the ‘hard points’, such as the suspension layout, axle positions, wheelbase and mechanical architecture. The early test car also represents an interesting point of departure between the philosophies Mercedes and Ferrari ultimately adopted: its relatively flat planes and inwardcurling endplates had long since been refined out of all recognition for the definitive aero kit. Ferrari’s front wing planes were more steeply angled – ‘inboard-loaded’ to use F1 parlance
“Mercedes had to park some of the more ambitious ideas it had planned for the W10. While the scope of the changes might seem fairly limited, Mercedes’ initial simulations indicated a loss of 2.5s a lap ”
“Some people were looking at the speed of the Ferrari and getting nervous about the front wing philosophy. But the people who’d designed the front wings were confident they’d done the right thing’
JOHN OWEN
– and while this carried a straightline speed benefit, the team struggled to match Mercedes for downforce. Not that this manifested itself straight away in Barcelona in February.
“It’s fair to say there were different views here,” says Owen. “Some people were looking at the speed of the Ferrari and getting nervous about the front wing philosophy. But the people who’d designed the front wings were confident they’d done the right thing – and not in an arrogant way.
“They fully understood what the Ferrari front wing was trying to do. In a way, it was what the inwashing endplates were doing on our original launch kit. We always knew that wasn’t the direction we wanted to go in. We believed we were on a better development path, but when it doesn’t show in the times on the board it gives you quite a bit of nervousness.
“If Ferrari had decided we’d got the right idea, then to change that one thing would have involved changing the whole car, spending a long time where they’re not improving performance on track as they change direction. The same would be true for us - if we were going to follow them, we’d have to spend months not moving forward while we swapped to a new direction.
“That’s why getting the direction right at the beginning is critical. You want to be on the right path, even if you’re behind the others at the start of the year, because normally you will prevail unless you run out of time to catch up. It may be that the Ferrari concept is the right path and that ultimately it will reach a higher plateau. Even now it’s hard to know that.”
Sentiments like that may provide some succour to harassed Ferrari aerodynamicists who are no doubt under pressure to copy the 2019 season’s winning car. Speculation aside, what’s been very interesting is how many other teams clearly haven’t written off Ferrari’s front-end concept. During practice for the final rounds of the 2019 season both Red Bull and Haas trialled new front wings that may or may not signal a shift in design philosophy for 2020. Both leant more towards Ferrari’s way of thinking than Mercedes’.
Come February in Barcelona we’ll know more. But perhaps not at the first test…