F1 season preview
MERCEDES : MEET THE WORLD CHAMP IONS
The circus is about to begin. We talk to Merc about this year’s car and predict the star turns
Rifts between teammates, arguments over powerplants, confusion regarding tyres – yep, F1’s back on the menu...
All of a sudden, the double world championship, and the relentless way those titles were delivered, is history. Welcome to 2015.
“For me, the hardest thing is the assumption that we’ll automatically be OK, and it’s an expectation we’ll be dealing with internally and externally,” technical director Paddy Lowe says. “There is no room to relax. Many teams have lost it over a winter.”
A Siberian weather front has chilled the Silverstone pit garage to freezing point, but not even snow can stop the Mercedes F1 steamroller. As Lowe pulls his branded beanie hat tight around his ears, Lewis Hamilton eases the new WO6 out onto a perilously slippy circuit and slots in behind a camera vehicle. Given its dominance last season, the new car looks broadly the same as its predecessor, but, as ever, the devil is in the detail, and its ingeniously packaged rear end looks more deliciously compact than ever.
It’s a moment to savour, for all of us, not least because this is the machine that may well power Hamilton to a Senna-equalling hat-trick of driver’s world titles, and in record time, too. Or perhaps not. “Red Bull, Ferrari, McLaren, they’re all great teams,” Lowe continues, with the clarity of the seasoned F1 pro, “and they want to win just as much as us. You can’t underestimate what they’ll do. The other threat is whether someone brings a signifcant innovation that you haven’t thought of…”
The very idea causes him visible emotional pain, not least because it was Merc who nailed it last year. Having mastered the complexities of the new hybrid powertrain, the team also surfed the wave of positive engine, aero and weight-saving efciencies its eureka-moment split turbo created. Lowe admits that we didn’t actually glimpse the WO5’s full potential until after the safety car at Bahrain, and the Merc squad heads into 2015 rumoured to have an even greater power advantage. Ominous. Over to powertrain genius Andy Cowell to explain exactly how ominous this threatens to be. Or perhaps not.
“I’ll tell you in Abu Dhabi. We now have four power units per season instead of fve, which is a challenge for all the manufacturers.” Then the poker face slips.
“Everyone has had the opportunity to do a performance update, which in this world means combustion efciency. As far as the hybrid system goes, turbine efciency is better, electrical efciency is better, all the high-voltage switching is more efcient, as is the main MGU. It’s quite an honourable thing to work on as an engineer – we’re trying to create a perpetual motion machine, where everything is that bit more efcient. But the biggest area of opportunity is still the internal combustion engine.
“Have we made a big enough step?” he muses. “I don’t know. Is it possible [for our rivals] to come up with an engine that’s more powerful than the one we’re starting with in Melbourne? Yes, it is.”
Tellingly, Cowell appears only mildly bothered that the FIA has relented on in-season testing, after some lobbying from Honda, a concession that theoretically erodes Merc’s advantage. “It increases costs, which is the opposite of what was originally intended,” he says diplomatically.
And what of the drivers? Our time with Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg – 19 minutes with the champion, slightly less with Nico, huddled around a table with three other media – is still hugely illuminating. Nico frst. Multilingual, annoyingly handsome (model mother, less so Keke, though his old man is hilarious) and visibly at ease, Nico alludes to a contented of-season in Ibiza cleaning up dog poo, acknowledges the tempting bowl of Haribo in front of us and is generally so perfect you begin to wonder if he’s assembled in the same facility as his engine. He processes our questions with machine-like efciency, and pointedly completes an answer even as his hapless interrogators trip over each other. There are some great insights.
“We had a talk from the ex-leader of the Red Arrows at a team event,” he recalls. “He said that fying the aircraft becomes sort of natural, so you have more capacity to think about problems that could arise. That’s all the same in a race car. It’s great if you make the driving fast the natural part, so that it becomes easy, then you have capacity left to think about optimising the lap, optimising diferent things.”
Should there be any spare capacity, though? How about going with this mooted 1,000bhp (mooted by one Bernie Ecclestone, principally)?
“One thousand bhp is not going to make it more difcult to drive. It’s just going to make it faster on the straights, and that’s not going to make the show any better or make it more challenging,” Nico insists. “Driving an F1 car is a massive challenge. When you’re on the limit, every car is a huge challenge. To be dancing on that limit, going over it sometimes, bringing it back, never staying too far under – that’s the biggest challenge. Mario Andretti once said that if everything feels under control, you’re not fast enough. That’s the same for all cars. But we do need to keep working on the sound [of the cars], because that is part of the show.”
When Lewis appears, it’s instantly apparent that Haribo jokes are of the menu. He’s snuggled deep inside a giant Canada Goose parka and has the frmest handshake I’ve ever encountered. I also know well from past encounters that he barely tolerates this part of his job. Racing, he says, is fun, but this is… work. He won’t get really excited until he’s lining up on the grid at Melbourne. He keeps a handwritten log of all his GP weekends, he says, which surprises me. “Because you probably don’t think we do very much!” he barks. “We work just like you… [pointing at my empty notepad] I have a book just like that. I note down things I need to remember and study – gear ratios, gear selections for corners, braking points, tons of stuf.”
Then there’s the baggage he allegedly brings into each season. One of us wonders if his surprising fuel efciency last year was a happy by-product of his overall ability. “[ Emphatically] Nothing just happens in F1. My advice to you is to never assume anything; most of the time when people assume, it’s wrong. Every new season I go into, it’s, ‘Oh he’s not going to be able to look after his tyres,’ or ‘He’s not going to be able to look after the fuel.’ I was the most eco-friendly driver out there last year, and I worked towards that. I’m not fghting my natural instincts, I’m just adapting my driving and putting some other techniques in.”
Oh yes, Lewis Hamilton can seem rather ‘focused’. Defensive, even, despite two world titles and the fact that he’s ofcially Britain’s most successful ever F1 driver.
But then talking about this stuf comes a distant second to actually doing it. And when you get into the racing nitty gritty, he’s electrifying. “There’s defnitely a… language to the car. When you look in the mirror and you see someone like Fernando, you’re going to do the same things, but you know how critical it is to be even more precise, because the moment you slip up, he’s there,” he says.
As for this season, well, rather like his car, 2015-spec Lewis merely needs a few tweaks. “I don’t think I need to change my approach too much. It worked pretty well last year,” he says. “There are always things you can do better. To really be able to push the car constantly lap after lap in qualifying, you have to have a balance you can really work with. This year, I’ll be trying to get it right more often, avoid going down the wrong road. [ pause] You have to go in quite open-minded. It’s actually harder for us to improve. There’s more of a step for the others to take.”
Like we say, ominous.
“WHEN YOU GET INTO RACING, HAMILTON IS ELECTRIFYING”