There’s been plenty
of cause for post-race
cuddles at Mercedes
this season
The individual set-ups between Hamilton and Bottas have to be
taken into account. The team generates different seats, but the pedal
width and spacing is also customised, and each driver has their
own preferences for colour codes on the wheel. Lewis likes purple,
apparently. The button set-ups vary, and even esoteric things like the
grip preferences and the thumb lengths of each driver are measured to
perfectly position the key controls on the wheel, examples of which cost
around $100K each. That’s an A45 AMG with some decent options. No
wonder the team get ticked off if the drivers throw them in the dirt.
We walk past the simulator where reserve driver Ocon spends hours
ahead of each race, preparing a briefing sheet based on his findings
to the teams. The ‘engine’ for the simulator is rFactor Pro, the industry
standard also used by Red Bull, with tracks mapped to the millimetre.
Things get even more techy when we get down into the materials
fabrication area. Here there are a set of five replica pit garages. Hamilton
and Bottas’ boxes sit in the same position as they’d be on track, Lewis
to the left, Valtteri to the right as you face them. There’s a titanium
halo structure to hand prior to it being wrapped in glossy carbonfibre.
We’re told that its front support affects driver vision negligibly and that
eye tracking demonstrated that drivers are looking obliquely into and
through bends at braking, apexes and exit points, while on straights
they’re often consulting the wheel, tuning diffs and checking lights.
The driveshaft that sends all that power to the wheels sits on a
workbench. It’s 30mm in diameter, not much wider than a Sharpie
marker. There are 70,000 components in the car and Mercedes is going
to RFID tag almost all of them. There’s a parts desk where engineers can
get hold of anything, but when it’s closed there are vending machines
that contain the most popular parts. Getting a new front wing endplate
is as easy as getting a Snickers on a railway station platform.
The CAD plans from the eggheads upstairs can be sent directly to
any one of 24 milling machines (11 of them five-axis units) to create metal
parts, or to the composites department to create the fine layers, or
layups, of which carbonfibre parts are composed. Five autoclaves big
enough to fit an entire chassis into, which cure the layups at 90psi and
180 degrees Celsius, hum in the background. The team also has X-ray
and CT scanners to check carbonfibre parts for microscopic cracks or
manufacturing defects. It takes around 50 days to build a chassis and
five are usually constructed per year. The team makes around 7000
parts per year in the composites department and there’s an almost
surgical cleanliness in there. Vacuum tables take care of splinters, which
can injure employees and puncture the airtight bags that are vacuum
compressed to bond the layups.
Some parts are bought in, but most are made in-house, especially
those with high intellectual property value. The metal parts are
particularly beautiful. A steering column gleams like something from a
Terminator movie, aluminium billets milled to sub-10 micron accuracy (a
human hair is 70 microns across) and we see samples of various steels,
aluminium and titanium, as well as Densamet, a heavy alloy of nickel and
tungsten that’s used for ballast. A 30mm cube of aluminium weighs 148
grams. The same cube in Densamet is 969g. It’s also useful for putting to
bed the urban myth that teams use depleted uranium as ballast.
We get a look at the seven-post rig that’s currently running a
simulation of the Shanghai track on a car. Four of the posts support the
wheels, the other three replicate gravitational forces on the chassis. It
can replicate an entire season’s running in 3.5 hours and subjects new
components to a punishing stress test. The cars sit on special balloon
tyres supplied by Pirelli for this very purpose. Genuine race tyres would
explode given this treatment.
This facility has come a long way since Honda pulled out of F1 in- Everybody who was laid off then has been offered a role back at
the expanded plant. Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport has won the
past five F1 constructors’ championships on the back of the amazing
brains trust at Brackley. F1 might be cyclical, but it’d be hard to bet
against a sixth succession.
ANDY ENRIGHT