© LAT Images for Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Ltd
Mercedes Technical Director James Allison says “the last two years have required us to adjust our approach and our methodology, our concept, if you will”.
For the past two years there has been a lot of talk of Mercedes’ car ‘concept’, in light of the team’s failure to challenge for race wins and championships.
In a talk with Sky Sports, Mercedes’ Technical Director James Allison explained what a ‘concept’ really means for the team.
“To the mind of a designer or a performance person in F1, concept is actually nothing to do with the car,” the Briton said.
“It’s about a process by which you decide what good looks like, and what bad looks like. It’s your methodology for sort of sieving out all the many, many things you might put on the car and finding only the ones that you really think are going to add lap time.
“It’s method. The car itself is just the output of that method. So when you talk to us about concept, we’re hearing: ‘What, you think our wind-tunnel weighting system wasn’t right?’
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“And we’ve changed that, or our way of meshing in CFD was wrong and we’ve changed the concept of that.
“That’s what concept means to us and the car just pops out at the far side of that when we apply that process and that concept.
“So, of course the last two years have required us to adjust our approach and our methodology, our concept, if you will.
“And as a result of that the hardware that pops out the far side of that, will necessarily be different hardware, because it’s defined by different decisions and different weightings of what’s important and what isn’t.
“You get all excited by the end result, but actually our fate is made by the approach.”
Allison also played down the importance of the team’s infamous ‘zero sidepods’.
“I don’t quite see the world the same way as you guys do, looking at a sidepod and deciding that’s a concept.
“We definitely took a path with our car, and I would say that’s from the tip of the nose to the very back of the tail, which was not a competitive one.
“The most visually notable aspect of that was our sidepods, but by no means the definitive factor.
“It was not right from front to back and that’s the thing we have had to learn and have had to deal with – that’s taken us longer than we would have liked.
“But the sidepods are maybe emblematic of a team that took a little too long to figure out which way was up, but by no means the distinguishing feature that sealed our fate,” he concluded.
