Doesn't sound like a big loss - second and third line players that Marchionne pulled from the sidelines. Also, looks like they have or are getting replacements, including an Italian from RBR.
I hope Binotto has worked out exactly where we are lacking, and the new guys are ready to get on with it straight away, and don’t have to serve out the season waiting to start for us. He is a brilliant engineer/technician, the problem with that type of mind is that it finds getting a point across less than easy! Four hours meetings to explain a five minute issue usually!
Engineers typically can think through things and that’s their role. However a team boss has to do that AND improvise in a bad situation and go by gut. This is where I am afraid he lacks and because he is team boss he has less time / energy to devote to engineering / technical and now we are lacking in both areas.
Traditionally, a team works best when there is a technical manager, and an operational manager, with clearly defined roles. Combining the 2 jobs puts too much responsabilities on one man.
If he sacked the aero performance guy and a simulation guy sounds to me he chose right and tells me they did all the right aero work but chose the wrong option to develop based on erroneous aero performance predictions and simulation.
The aero mistakes reminds me of the gross error taken some years ago under Domenicali when the engine lacked power because the aerodynamics was going to make the car a winner. The Ferrari of that year couldn't get by a Caterham. I agree with Ingenere that the data used to make the decision was wrong. But why didn't the team use their past years experience in questioning the data?
I suspect the aero design and data was right. I imagine they had a lower downforce/lower drag configuration and a higher downforce/higher drag configuration, the latter more like Merc, for instance, which Binotto said they evaluated. So putting the aero data on the simulator, they determined that the lower downforce/lower drag solution was faster but without considering that this was not going to put enough heat into the tires so not getting the performance expected. If this is indeed the case, sounds like their tire model was wrong which is not surprising as the tire construction has changed for this year.
I wonder if something in the tyre compounds changed between early testing both last year (presumably some was done), and the actual racing enviornment. Seems strange the car should be so quick in pre-season, and now its potentially second rate. Or was Mercedes just sandbagging as some of my friends here think.
Agree, they were in full deception mode at Barcelona. With regards to testing and data analysis, you would have thought they had learned a big lesson when their wind tunnel threw out the wrong data a few years back - wrong calibration was the excuse, whats the old saying.....feed in **** and get out **** Not many there with EXPERIENCE to sense when something isn't right.
No bagging. Car changes for Mercedes in test 2 provided gains to match Ferrari. They built the better machine with better all round aero it seems. They developed better. Ferrari went toooo Redbull in concept via rake etc
Someone told me that for the second week testing in Barcelona, Mercedes brought a completely different car. One of the previous posts said Ferrari should have 2 cars built with different concepts. Sorry I can’t remember who wrote it. Sent from my iPhone using FerrariChat.com mobile app
In late February, hopes were ramped up as the red cars looked comfortably faster than the Mercedes in testing at the Circuit de Catalunya. But this wasn't a case of smoke and mirrors,the Ferraris really were that much faster, it's just that Mercedes' car in the first week of testing was still a long way off its final concept. Regulation changes to the front wing over the winter had initially left Mercedes flustered. The team's aerodynamic concept was based on its ability to load up the tips of the front wing and manipulate air downstream with devices around the front wing endplates, but the simplified regulations for 2019 stripped the team of one its key strengths. "When we first put these new regulations on, which have much less geometrical freedom [for the front wing], it haemorrhaged downforce off our car because one of our key features was totally broken," Mercedes technical director James Allison told Sky Sports earlier this year. "When I say haemorrhaged, I mean 2.5 seconds gone! It was a big deal. "So we started to try to understand what was broken and why, and all of the interface between the front wing endplate and the flap was irredeemably knackered -- the flow structures that we had been developing had just collapsed." In order to hit its launch date and buy some time, Mercedes had to come up with a compromise for the first test before an overhaul of every aerodynamic surface was introduced for the second test. "We started working on it, and we started trying to understand why the air wouldn't go where we wanted it to any more, and we started to modify the geometry and see how we could persuade it back into order," Allison said. "On our first version on the launch car, you can see that our front wing endplate doesn't even point outboard, it points inboard. That's because at the time we froze that car that was the best we could do. "It was restoring some of the control we had previously had outboard, restoring some of the load we had previously had outboard, but we couldn't yet expand it sideways without it falling off the wing. "It took us a few weeks and months to learn how to do that, but once we had learned how to do that we, by and large, had managed to retain a lot of the power that we had in the tip of the front wing previously, which had been an important part of our world." As a result, Mercedes' rate of development in the second week of testing was rapid. The team was finding massive performance gains each day, but it was only by the final day that it showed some of its potential with a lap time to equal Ferrari's best. By that point, however, the narrative of testing was already set, and one lap on a Friday afternoon wasn't enough to unpick it. Unfortunately, the reality was setting the Italian team up for a fall. https://www.espn.com/f1/story/_/id/26892630/expectations-versus-reality-gone-wrong-ferrari-year
Just don't believe what Allison or others at Mercedes tell the press, the car was infinitely better than what was on show at Barcelona testing in Feb and the first race [procession]. As I have said many times, as soon as anyone gets close to Mercedes, they always [magically] find that next performance step. I call the sandbagging
Indeed, we are in the invidious situation where any possible F1 drama is manufactured by Toto, Allison and Lewis "managing the truth". Ooh Bottas is quick and a possible champ ! Ooh Ferrari will be fast here ! Ooh my tires were shot, thank god I'm the GOAT ! Really? Just STFU ! All this BS has a very negative effect on my perception of Mercedes as a whole. Though to be fair i have never forgiven them for that driving through Maranello post season victory ad of a few years back. Wankers. Ahem..there, got that off my chest.
Yep, week 1 during testing the W10 was a "teaser" It was week 2 during testing where the massive upgrades came into fruition--> way more aero and suspension tweaks suggesting MB already had these massive upgrades well in advance....and they ran with it at Melbourne.
Totally agree but - Aero and suspension tweaks [ or is it the fundamental design withheld) don't happen overnight, That car was already built and ready to go as these take weeks to find its way on a car from concept to manufacture and test. My guess is that many of the items were tested and evaluated at the 1st event. The Italians call it the muletto. That car is way quicker than what we are seeing on the racetrack- possibly by at least a second or more per lap, why show your hand! No doubt about it, they have a much slicker team and play the Trojan horse very well. As for Hamilton, well I think most can see through the BS Canada could be a slight turning point for the SF if they haven't panicked and taken two steps back. Their aero philosophy could give them a chance but as the last few years have shown, their qualifying is poor at best, get the mercs in the centre of the pack and they will have problems . Most F1 drama is manufactured to spice up the event. Tony
I won't dignify that by copy and pasting the last word of my post and snipping off the s Mercedes PR attempts to inject drama into the championship battle do indeed grate. I don't remember us doing that when we were on top and sadly the excellent Mika Hakkinen's Mac was a much greater threat to us then, than we are to Merc now.
It is possible no one listen to him at Ferrari either. Ferrari are fallible as well. His ideas may have been ruled out. That is not a Mercedes problem. Mercedes seems to engage staff more effectively
