38 whichcar.com.au/wheels
E GET GPS data from all of the teams. If
Lewis wants to see the data from the last
50 exits from a corner by Vettel, we can
give him that information.”
Think about that for a moment. Now
imagine how every F1 team can therefore
extrapolate how much power its rivals are making, how consistent rival
drivers are, and which line through a corner works for any given surface,
weather or tyre-wear condition. We’re sitting in Mercedes F1’s race
control room in Brackley and the technological overload is staggering.
Outside this glass-walled nerve centre are the biggest brains in the
organisation, a whole floor of designers in cubicles, most with PhDs
from places like MIT, Harvard or Oxbridge. Their screens show various
iterations of suspension components, body panels, hubs, flanges and
other things I can’t identify. Inside the control room it’s quiet. Hamilton
and Bottas have just scored a one-two at Bahrain. Brackley is a happy
ship at the moment. The data card for ‘Bahrain 5.412km’ and a layout for
the track sits on the rows of keyboards and monitors in the control room.
In all, there are 126 monitors in here.
Our guide explains how this all works on race weekends. “We have
90-100 people going to 21 countries on race weekends. Our travel and
logistics department take care of all their visas and vaccinations in-house.
It’s a big task. The team take over 40 tonnes of gear per race. FIA rules
dictate that we are only allowed 60 people at the track who can affect
the performance of the car,” he explains. Hence this place.
In theory, any of the 20 people in here on race weekends can press
a button and communicate directly with the driver, but team protocol
dictates that any requests must go through the race engineer on the pit
wall. The data transmission rates are incredible. “We use Tata subsea
fibre-optic cables to carry the data,” explains our guide. “We’re almost
live. We’re 0.1 seconds from any race in the world, except for Australia.
That signal takes 0.4 seconds to arrive.” So much for the NBN. Every
time the car passes the pits, it wirelessly hands over gigabytes of data
that then comes streaming into Brackley, 115km north-west of London,
in less time than it takes to blink. There’s a certain exactitude to the
engineers here. Woe betide anyone overheard calling the 0.1sec
delayed transmission a live stream.
The Brackley site is a legacy of the days of the old Adrian Reynard
works. The Mercedes F1 team can trace its lineage from Tyrell to BAR
to Honda to Brawn GP and then, in 2010, to the three-pointed star.
It’s fair to say that the budgets have stepped up a bit since the virtually
penniless Brawn GP days. “Red Bull certainly missed a trick in 2009,”
laughs our guide. “We had such little money as Brawn GP that had theyjust bumped a few front wings off in free practice, we wouldn’t have had
the funding to have replaced them. They’d have taken the title.” Things
have certainly changed since then, as evidenced by one designer telling
us: “We engineer based on need, not budget.” Imagine how galling
that must sound to Haas or Racing Point.
The wind tunnel on site was originally developed by Honda and
features a 2.2-megawatt fan that’s so powerful that it’s seismically
isolated on a sprung concrete block. Without it, the rest of the complex
shakes when the tunnel’s in use. Although a full-sized car can fit in
the tunnel, FIA rules limit teams to a 60 percent scaled model on the
grounds of cost. Wind tunnels are hugely expensive and even Ferrari
uses the old Toyota tunnel in Cologne, along with McLaren and, until
this week, Racing Point, who now buy time at Brackley.
The rules are dense, and there’s a vast formula which limits the
combined time in tunnels and also computational fluid dynamics (virtual
wind tunnel) testing that can be done. Tunnel occupancy is filmed by
FIA cameras so teams can’t sidestep the rules. The FIA also imposes a
mandatory summer break. That’s when the tunnel gets a deep clean.
What’s perhaps most dizzying about the process of constructing an
F1 car are the things we don’t tend to consider. Sure, it’s amazing that
a 1.6-litre petrol engine can develop 635kW+ with another 120kW
coming from a battery beneath the driver’s backside. Or that thermal
efficiency is better than 50 percent; way better than the best road car
powerplant. It’s incredible to look at the titanium gearbox that’s no
bigger than a lunchbox, which changes gear in three-thousandths of a
second and which, as a stressed member, holds the whole rear crash
structure and wing. It’s the attention to detail that’s astonishing.
The front wing on Nico Rosberg’s FW07, in which he won the 2016
drivers’ championship, consists of 290 separate components. When
you see a wing smashed off, bear in mind that it takes 50 man hours just
to paint. There are only four airbrush artists in the UK skilled enough to
paint the 3D-effect three-pointed star onto the nosecone, and the front
wing contains infra-red sensors that scan the front tyres, passing that
data to the pits so that tyre degradation can be viewed in (almost)
real time. They’re part of a suite of 400 sensors on the car which
are used on Friday free practice, the number of sensors then
being pared back across the weekend before the car enters parc
ferme in its lightest practical guise.
This year’s car (FW10) features 1100 hand-painted three-pointed stars
on its bodywork, each individually coloured to blend with the black-to-
silver fade the Mercedes cars have been using since the introduction of
hybrid tech in 2014. The paint team travel to each race, and in China and
the US they use local Mercedes dealerships as paint shops.v rrun
CAR CULTURE
Building Lewis
Hamilton’s F1 car
WE GO BEHIND THE SCENES AT BRACKLEY,
MERCEDES-AMG’S F1 NERVE CENTRE““