Hybrid, like a Prius…
Familiarity breeds complacency, contempt even. And if you’ve grown a little tired of silver Mercedes-AMGs securing poles and fastest laps with grinding regularity, you are not alone.
But fortunately there’s YouTube, so fire it up. Now search ‘F1 2014 Hamilton pole lap Australia’ and escort from within earshot anyone who might be offended by spontaneous swearing.
With the first couple of corners you notice two things. One: the track’s soaked and Hamilton’s on wets. Two: the noise. This, you’ll recall, was the first race of the so-called hybrid era (we’d seen KERS e-boosting previously) and fans raged at the passing of the old V8s and their banshee scream. The Merc’s hybrid V6 is more muted, less insanely extreme, but it’s only when you watch it being spanked again now, with the volume cranked, that you appreciate how evil the thing sounds – the combustion engine’s guttural, tyre-wilting potency overlaid with the eerie, almost alien machinations of the electrical system.
Hamilton’s pole lap is one of two halves: surreally neat and tidy bar a few oopsie-daisy moments of huge low-speed understeer, then 20-odd seconds of terrifying power oversteer as the rear wets, already punch-drunk from the power unit’s epic torque, crash to the canvas in the face of Hamilton’s ever-greedier right foot.
In Australia, as was the case in the first four Grands Prix of the season, the Mercedes-AMG W05 took pole, the win and fastest lap – a scarcely credible run of dominance that came to an end in Spain only because Vettel was able to steal fastest lap in his Red Bull.
Clues that Mercedes had a brilliant car were there at the first pre-season test. After three days’ running they’d completed 309 laps to reigning champions Red Bull’s 21. With distance and hindsight we see the W05’s PU106A power unit for what it was: a towering technical achievement up there with the Saturn rocket and Concorde.
The history of F1 is punctuated by moments of big-bang brilliance; elegant solutions to fiendishly complex problems. The first hybrid AMG power unit – and it really was a unit; the engine is but part of its eco-system – neatly squared countless contradictory circles. The 600bhp V6 was lightweight and compact but also rugged enough to hold together in the face of combustion chamber pressures twice that of the naturally-aspirated V8s. The crank-driven regen motor is tucked deep in the car, for improved weight distribution, but so effectively cooled it was reliable despite temperatures four times that of the old and very flaky KERS units. And crucially, where rivals engineered their turbos traditionally, with the turbine and compressor together in a single unit, AMG separated the two, linked by a shaft between the V6’s cylinder banks. Why? Because turbines are hot and compressors more powerful when they’re cool: the two are happier apart.
The W05’s majesty comes not from any specific detail but from the seamless integration of those details. It was an R&D lab hidden inside a beautifully balanced and exploitable racing car. The proof’s on YouTube.