Mercedes engine trick, McLaren in the dark: Piastri: “I didn’t know”, Stella: “It’s not at our disposal”

A legal Mercedes trick As observed on Friday at the British Grand Prix, Mercedes put a particular technique of exploiting electricity on the track. Andrea Kimi Antonelli and George Russell exploit all 350 kW until a few meters from the finish line, suddenly taking their foot off the accelerator and causing the battery support to collapse. With the pilot’s – unnatural – action they manage to adhere to the regulation and bypass the gradual scaling of 50 kW per second.
Why is this done? To exploit a surplus of energy just before the action of lifting the foot, which overall would give an advantage in terms of lap time. McLaren super surprised Only Mercedes is using this trick and not the customer teams. In fact, at McLaren they confirmed that they were totally in the dark, Oscar Piastri literally fell from the clouds – in the statements reported by The Race -: “I didn’t even know they did it, which says quite a lot…”, the Australian pointed out mischievously. Team principal Andrea Stella is on the same wavelength: “It surprised us a bit, because it’s not something we had discussed. I’m not at all sure that it’s available to us, because it probably requires some additional elements to be able to use the power unit. There are ongoing discussions with Mercedes HPP at a technical level to make sure we make the most of this exceptional power unit, which is truly a masterpiece of technology. We’ll continue to talk because when we analyze the performance on the straights, even taking into account lower aerodynamic resistance, some question marks remain.”

Automobile Magazine – Formula1 English, News

2026-07-05 07:49:00