Different treatment
Mercedes first and second, the other customer teams powered by the Brixworth power unit far away. McLarenthe first of the ‘other Mercedes’ and reigning constructors’ champion for two seasons, he took 50 seconds from winner George Russell. Such a large gap has raised some doubts in the paddock regarding a possible ‘different’ treatment reserved by Casa della Stella for its customers. The power unit supplied to McLaren, Williams and Alpine is the same one mounted on the W22s – the regulations prescribe this – but these teams were supplied with all the ‘instructions’ to make them work correctly? Listening to some post-race statements made to journalists present in Australia by the McLaren team principal, Andrea Stellasome doubts arise.
“The discussion with HPP (Mercedes High Performance Powertrains) about the opportunity to have more information has been going on for weeks because, even during testing, we were pretty much just going out on the track, driving the car, looking at the data and saying ‘oh, here’s what we’ve got. Well, now let’s react to what we have’. This is not how Formula 1 works – the Italian manager pointed out – In Formula 1 what happens on the track is simulated. You know what’s happening, you know what you’re planning, you know how the car will behave. So you also have your plans on how to evolve it that you’ve worked out beforehand because you know what you expect. I have to say that since we are a client team [di Mercedes], this is the first time we also feel at a disadvantage when it comes to the ability to predict how the car will behave and the ability to anticipate how we can improve it”.
We need more information exchange
The objective, 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 again, responding to those who asked him for a comment on the reflections made by James Vowles, who had said himself “caught off guard” from 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 some 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 more to do. Now it’s not obvious how to do this. We are on a journey of learning and we are certainly further behind than the official team”.
“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. That’s right, but We will definitely intensify the collaboration with HPP because we believe there are some easy-to-obtain advantages that we should be able to exploit – concluded Stella – when it comes to whether this is all that’s available that we’re underutilizing, I’m not sure. I think we will need further analysis to understand whether these are just parameters that we can control, or driver inputs that we can control, or whether there are other, more systemic factors that a customer team can’t necessarily control.“.
