Different treatment
Mercedes first and second, the other customer teams powered by the Brixworth power unit far behind. McLaren, the first of the ‘other Mercedes’ and reigning champion for two seasons among the Constructors, trailed by 50 seconds from the winner George Russell. Such a wide gap has raised some doubts in the paddock regarding a possible ‘different’ treatment reserved by the House of the Star for its customers. The power unit supplied to McLaren, Williams and Alpine is the same one mounted on the W22 – the regulations prescribe it – but were these teams provided with all the ‘instructions’ to make them work correctly? Listening to some post-race statements released to journalists present in Australia by McLaren team principal, Andrea Stella, some doubts arise.
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“The discussion with HPP (Mercedes High Performance Powertrains) on the opportunity to have more information has been going on for weeks because, even during testing, we were practically limited to going out on track, driving the car, looking at the data and saying ‘oh, here’s what we have. Well, now let’s react to what we have’. This is not how you work in Formula 1 – the Italian manager pointed out – In Formula 1 what happens on track is simulated. You know what is happening, you know what you are programming, you know how the car will behave. So you also have your plans on how to evolve it that you have worked out previously because you know what you expect. I must say that, since we are a customer team [of Mercedes], this is the first time we feel at a disadvantage even when it comes to the ability to predict how the car will behave and the ability to anticipate how we can improve it”.
More information exchange needed
The goal, at McLaren, is therefore to increase the exchange of information with the Brixworth factory as much as possible: “I don’t know what Williams thinks – Stella added, responding to those who asked him for a comment on the reflections made by James Vowles, who said he was “caught off guard” by the efficiency of the Mercedes engine in terms of power distribution – I can say that we have dedicated a lot of time to analysis and comparison, not only with the HPP teams, in particular Mercedes, but also with other competitors. And certainly the result of this analysis seems to indicate that we have work to do as a team in collaboration with our HPP engineers. We must work to exploit the potential of the power unit. Given the potential that HPP is extracting, it seems there is still much to do. Now it is not obvious how to do it. We are on a path of knowledge and certainly we are further behind than the factory team”.
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“The factory team and HPP will have worked together for a long time. So, they will have collaborated and discussed how to use the power unit. It’s only right, but we will certainly intensify the collaboration with HPP because we believe there are easy gains to be made that we should be able to exploit – Stella concluded – when it comes to understanding if this is all that is available and that we are underutilizing, I’m not sure. I think we will need further analysis to understand if it’s just parameters we can control, or driver inputs we can control, or if there are other factors, more systemic, that a customer team cannot necessarily control“.
