One question: what impact will the new Petronas involvement cause in engine department
Each and every engine is made and based on a particular type of oil specially made for it (like all Merc teams use Mobil1)
what will happen to Merc engine if they are switched to Pertonas?
Will that effect their performance?, will it effect their mileage?
So does the other customer teams have to swtich to pertronas aswell?
can anyone answer?

Most likely that Petronas will be used for the fuel only, as opposed to the engine oil. Certainly Petronas has experience with BMW therefore if they are better than Mobil 1 then its good for Mercedes, but its likely to be fuel and sponsorship only. Why risk engine reliability etc.

Check this out:

http://www.drivethebest.com/


.... Life imitating ...... well?...... life??

This whole semi-fancy "boutique" sucks arse. Period.

For future referance please don't post similar unpleasant middle class garbage again.

This is the Mercedes GP Petronas thread and not some smutty voyeur thread.

Thanks in advance.

Wow .. woke up on the wrong side of the bed today?

It was funny - Especially as practically no one in the US follows F1 and wouldn't get it

Mercedes is like a red flag waving to all those pit bull F1 teams.First up with MS every other driver on the grid is going to be gunning for him.To top that they have sort of "stolen " prize assets form both Ferrari and Mclaren. Add to that the DD saga which most feel was the cause of their WCC and WDC -looks like their gonna have one mammoth uphill battle come 2010.

im more miffed they nicked petronas off sauber

Why? Petronas were under no oblgation to stay with the newest incarnation Sauber simply because they had been involved for so long. They had every right to go to any other team they wanted to, and my understanding was that the chose Mercedes because they wanted to be affiliated with a top team. They had previously tried with BMW - and it was expected that BMW would be title contenders this seaosn, which they plainly weren't - and now that Sauber is taking control of the team again (and he's said to be reluctant about it, so it wouldn't surrise me if he sells the team at the end of 2010), they evidently don't feel the same way about it.

Together with the F1 sponsorship deal, Petronas has closed a big business-to-business deal with Mercedes-Benz cars, something Sauber could certainly not offer.

Is anyone else getting very tired of this idiot union boss bitching and moaning about Mercedes being in F1 and everything they do in F1? Now he's having a go at their decision to sign Schumacher, a bloody German national hero.



http://www.crash.net/f1/news/155603/1/schu...edes_board.html

Nevermind that Mercedes have only had to spend money so far on acquiring the team, or that with the resource restriction agreement it will probably be possible to fund the team only on prize money and sponsorship dollars.

I can't wait until Mercedes win a world championship under the resource restriction agreement and earn a profit as a team. Uwe will then whine with something along the lines of "They should have left F1 and earned that 100 million EUR from selling more Smart cars."

I really hope this guy hasn't procreated with someone yet. It would be a shame if his genes survive another generation of human evolution. What a real Sauerkraut.

Why should MB waste money on an irrelevant form an entertainment that's quite boring.
If F1 was real motorsport I would have understood.

Currently, what is real motorsport?

Apparently the last real motorsport event was in 1920 or something.

It's whatever Kimi is driving these days...

Is Schumacher really coming back or will he be stopped again like his return with Ferrari?

New (for me) are today Ferrari voices which I haven't heard before. I detect some unfriendliness in noise emanating from Ferrari's quarters. Domenicali saying (paraphrasing) I prefer to look towards future, rather then in the world of nostalgia (speaking about Ralf, but it might have been just as well related to Michael), son of Enzo, Piero took also hard nose attitude, well, well, well...

Based on those feelings I think it's fair to say that we cannot be friends to all, and perhaps Michael's departure is then well timed. I am not sure what instigated some of these feelings and whether this is all based only on his recent decision, but obviously end of his career at Ferrari as a driver might have more components to it than just Michael being disinterested (and tired). I am not suggesting that there were forces in the background pushing him out, but maybe just overall atmosphere was lacking novelty, which presence of a new driver like Alonso might bring in. Having said that, on down side, implications are then that Alonso is also on borrowed time, and we do not know how long that is going to last.

He's really coming back - he couldn't sign anything until he had a clean bill of health.

I sensed this but it's because they are admittedly disappointed about Michael's departure.

But I agree that his departure has been well timed. If Alonso does well, he will be the new star of the team, also on the PR front. If he doesn't do well, does Michael really need another three years of finger pointing that he sabotages Alonso's car or that it's his presence that disturbs Alonso etc? And the Spanish press would definitely put the blame on him (to not to have to put it on Alonso) even more so than the Finnish. So all he could be at Ferrari from now on is a scapegoat. I think it's better that he leaves. Now Alonso has the team all for himself.

interesting quote from Nick wirth on BrawnGPs mistakes and why jensons set-up was wrong:

"Brawn brought out the new front wing development for Jenson Button to run at Suzuka this year and it was a disaster, it didn't work and it screwed his race up. They have a load of aerodynamic technology which says that front wing is good, they put it on the guy trying to win the world championship at a critical race, and it didn't work"

Source: Autosport

maybe the aero department not all that good at brackley.

MAybe the person who was driving it, was not good enough?

Good enough to win 6 from 7 races, but not enough to score points. Give us a break. Can't wait till Jenson proves himself by demolishing his new teammate

well didn't jenson revert back to the old front wing? or did he continue with the new wing anyone know?

You do know that his teammate for next year is Hamilton, don't you?

that is it, he is good and spot on when everything is perfect
But once its off he is just a mediocre driver
and i think he will loose Royally to Lewis next year .....he should have stayed with Brawn for next year

Ferrari must have sensed too that they went little over the edge, because today a new "correction" about that relationship had appeared. ( I wonder who had spearheaded that article... )

Brawn didn't introduce a new wing at Suzuka, they raced the same front wing as in Singapore. I don't think Nick Wirth actually knows what he is talking about in this case.

Think you might be in for a nasty shock.

He has engineers from every team, former Brawn GP included, he knows it better, than you, I'm sure.

There was a tweaked front wing. And yes, they reverted to a previous version I noticed at the time.

Is there a team who's mechanical and aero updates always work as predicted?

Wirth is talking big. Looking forward to see if his can punch a decent hole in the air.

Which driver was that again 2009 year, Jenson, Rubens, Alonso, Lewis, Heifeld or Kubica???

Just to mention the 'percieved' top guys.

It will be interesting considering Hamilton is probably the fastest/best driver out there and Jenson approaches with a completely different style so I can assure you "demolish" will never happen.

F1 isn't about being the fastest out there over a lap, it's about putting 50 of them together and be totally faster than the others and if Jenson is at the finish line somewhere near Hamilton I think he will be rightfully lauded for it.

thats what puzzled me in the race it didn't look like a new one. Maybe they tried it during practice i dunno, and didn't use it

Pretty much every engineer in F1 is on 6 months notice these days. When someone resigns they are "quarantined" during this 6 month period, to limit the damage from the spread of information.

So if they worked for Brawn during the Suzuka weekend, they cannot be working for Nick Wirth now.

Singapore
Suzuka

Both photos from the race. Looks exactly the same to me.

Actually, they went through several modifications after Valencia, only to revert back to the Valencia version version for Interlagos and Abu Dhabi:

-Valencia - Note that the the yellowish part of he winglet is curled. The winglet also has a support.

-Spa - An extra slightly curled deflector on the footplate. Also notice the supports for the winglets are gone. And the yellowish part on the winglet is straight instead of curled.

-For Singapore and Japan they went to another version without the extra curled deflector on the footplate.

-Interlagos/Abu Dhabi - Here they reverted back to the Valencia version.

Don't be naive. Maybe on paper. In practice, they are free to talk with their next employer. Anyway as you've noticed even fans can know about that development struggle what Wirth noted.

RichardBranson: "(Technical director) Nick Wirth and the people he's got around him are brilliant. Because Nick's there, he's attracted engineers from Brawn, from Red Bull, from almost all the other teams, and he's got a really great group of people."

They also had these two versions at Interlagos (both have different endplates at the bottom), but used the "old" one for the race, which is quite interesting. But I still can't find anything that screwed up Jenson's race at Suzuka as Wirth said.

engineers from Brawn and Red Bull left their teams to the guy who wants to build the car solely on CFD If there were any, most def it wasnt anyone significant.

You can't know that for certain. You're basing everything on the assumption that everyone in the paddock except for Nick Wirth considers CFD to be a waste of time, which they most certainly do not, since a lot of people use it. The difference between them and Wirth is that Wirth is using more CFD and less wind tunnels.

Screwed up his preparation to the race and screwed up the predicted/expected pace. Starting to use a new part on a race weekend, and reverting back to the old one in a rush when they don't get the expected result from the new one is not optimal to finetune and find the best race setup.

But Wirth talked about development mistakes, which use to happen even with traditional development methods, like wind tunnel testing. He talked about a Brawn example broadly, but didn't fabricate it. A team develops new aero parts to make the car faster to grab more points and wins. Non-working new parts and reverting to old parts don't make the car as fast as was predicted based on the simulations and wind tunnel data. It makes a big development effort faulty and quite useless. That may screw the race in that extent the expected pace could have been enough to fight for podium, but the old package was enough only for lower points. And we should know what a single point can decide.

If and when it becomes evident that the Mercedes GP car for 2010 is not as good as supposed, I am sure that some yet undiscovered medical problems will come to the fore, which will prevent Schumi from seeing out the 2010 season...

OK, so Wirth wants to tell us that his CFD centre is as good as CFD centres + wind tunnels of any other teams. That's hard to believe for me, but time will tell. Anyway, it's a discussion for different thread.

Out of curiousity, what resources does the Mercedes/Brawn team have? I know they have alot of wind tunnels, but what about CFD and simulators?

Where are they in terms of technological resource compared with Ferrari and McLaren?

CFD: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijqThp_fxFk
A Cruden Driver Simulator: http://www.cruden.com/ (not confirmed though).

They don't have 'a lot of' wind tunnels. Just 2, on site.
An older one (renovated in 2007) and a newly built full size one with adaptive walls (2006).

Guys, keep the thread on topic. Some posts have been removed.

Can we really call Silver Arrows a car entirely designed, built, developed, and managed in the UK???

even the engine comes from England, the drivers will be German.

All about the backing I suppose. Red Bull is Austrian but a UK based team with a French engine. The UK has specialised in F1 for so long its probably not economically viable to start a new team in Germany. Toyota proved that with the biggest budget in F1 history. Now Toyota have gone whats happening with their facilities?

Nonsense. Toyota failed because they had the arrogance of expecting to win in F1 while having the team somehow integrate with their matrix approach to management. In F1 you need a semi-autonomous entity that can make decisions almost as fast as their cars. When major decisions become part of an agreement by committee process, you have lost your train in the fast paced world of F1

not mine.