© Steve Etherington for Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Ltd.
Former Mercedes Design Engineer Gabriel Elias wrote an in-depth article about the team’s testing philosophy and revealed its “secret weapon”.
Gabriel Elias has been employed by Mercedes for six years and helped to design the cars that won the past seven constructors’ titles. In an article he wrote for RACER, Elias talked about his experiences during pre-season testing with the team.
“When I first began working in Formula 1, my perception of pre-season testing was probably the same as a lot of people’s,” wrote Elias.
“You imagine these teams having worked all winter on their new car, and then going to the track for this day of reckoning where they find out whether all that work has paid off with the performance they were expecting. That, and some trepidation about what the opposition has been up to during the off-season.
“But the truth of the matter is that in my time at Mercedes, when we got to the first test, it was really just about mileage accumulation. We were trying to break the car. We already knew that there was performance, so the first test was essentially for validation.”
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But while the team would understand their performace level even before they’ve tired out the car on the track, the opposition could occassionally surprise them.
“During my time with the team it was rare that one of our rivals came out with something that really surprised us, but there were certainly a couple of occasions when we all started looking at something another car was doing, like, ‘Whoa, that was gnarly’.
“A couple of years ago at Melbourne, we had an onboard of the Ferrari rear wing and we saw the thing diving — we could see flexing at speed on the straight. And we’re all sitting there like, ‘How the hell are they doing it?’
“That was one where I remember we looked at it really closely, like, ‘How can we do this?’ We tried to scheme up some options that would maybe get us a similar result”
Ultimately Elias reveals what he believes is Mercedes’ “secret weapon”.
“It’s not purely about superior on-track performance, it’s reliability because of the things like the dyno and all the other different isolated test cells that were at R&D that allowed the team to prove out the car before we ever had to put it onto a track.
“And that’s what my former colleagues will have been focusing their energy on before shipping the new car out to Bahrain this week,” concluded Elias.
