The Mercedes AMG F1 team have been utterly dominant in the past few seasons. Yet, they claim that their car is not perfect and there are still issues to iron out.
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With regard to their 2019 W10, the German outfit claims to have solved one big problem which plagued them its predecessor. Technical director, James Allison has predicted that the new W10 will be ‘softer’ on the rear tyres. He is also confident that the team can maximise performance on every track in 2019.
“The handling of the W09 was a big improvement over the rather idiosyncratic W08. We managed to be competitive at tracks which had plagued us in recent years,” Allison said at the Mercedes launch.
“However, notwithstanding this improvement, we were still not as good as some of our competitors at preserving the performance of the rear tyres.
“We have worked hard on the suspension and aerodynamic characteristics to deliver a car that will be much kinder to its tyres – enough, we hope, to allow us to be competitive at all phases of the race and at each track on the calendar.
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Mercedes
Meanwhile, rivals Ferrari claim to have eked out an extra 1.5 seconds over the winter. This is likely something that Mercedes will have to counteract if they want to retain their title-winning streak.
Other changes include ones made to the power unit in order to extract more power.
“We’ve made changes to the cooling architecture of the power unit,” said Managing Director of Performance Powertrains, Andy Cowell. He continued, “they will hopefully provide aerodynamic benefit on the car and also provide efficiency benefit on the power unit – so hopefully a win on both the chassis and on the power unit.
“Right at the heart of the power unit is the conversion of fuel into heat release in the combustion chamber and useful work out of the crankshaft. We have made steps on the combustion efficiency and on the [energy recovery system]. The marriage between the turbocharger assembly with the MGU-H, the inverter, the cells and the MGU-K: that whole system is now capable of operating more efficiently and helping with energy deployment through a race.”
