© Sam Bloxham for Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix ltd.
Mercedes’ Technical Director James Allison attended the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix Friday Press Conference. Here is the full transcript.
Q: James welcome. Lovely to see you. Now, it’s been a fairly up and down season for Mercedes so far. Are you close to achieving some kind of consistency with the W15 now?
James ALLISON: Well, I’m not sure that I’ve noticed too much of the up, but I think after a pretty uninspiring start, we are starting to get to grips with it a little bit. Today was a better day thus far. Let’s see if we can sustain that through the important parts of the weekend.
Q: You’re running some new parts here. Are you seeing some improvements that weren’t there at the last race in Miami?
JA: I’d say cautiously yes, but it’s a gradual thing.
Q: And James, looking at bigger picture stuff. How difficult is this period for you compared to other moments of pressure during your career?
JA: I don’t think it’s any more difficult for me than it is for all of us in the team. It’s always tough when a car isn’t where you want it to be. And that is not an enjoyable situation. On the other hand, once you do start to get your head around it and start to move it forward, that then becomes extremely pleasurable. So hopefully we’ve got the worst of the grim feeling behind us and are now on the upward slope of that.
Q: There are a lot of staff movements at the moment. You’ve had some big players come, you’ve had some big players go. Would you call this the normal ebb and flow of a Formula 1 team? Or are you gearing up to a new era and needing some new skill sets?
JA: No, I think it’s more in the normal ebb and flow of an F1 team. The teams are big these days and in any given year you are shipping out a whole bunch of people and shipping in a matching number. That will be true in nearly every team.
Q: All right, look, final one from me. A lot of speculation about George Russell’s teammate next year. Would you go for youth over experience?
JA: Well, happily, it’s not me that makes that choice. So I’ll just take the fifth on that one and leave it to the bigger dogs in the team to answer that.
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QUESTIONS FROM THE FLOOR
Q: (Jon Noble – Motorsport.com) James, one of the challenges of these ground effect cars is the balance with the performance in high speed and low speed, that you get a car that performs well in one, it doesn’t in the other, then you solve the weakness and it limits the strength. How far down are you in understanding that kind of aspect on your car and are the upgrades that are coming over the next few races, how much will they address that issue and improve it, do you think?
JA: I think we’re gradually getting there. This track is probably one of the easier ones in that regard because the range of cornering speed is not that high. So it’s a thing that all of us face and I think we’ve been a little slower than others to address it. But I think that you’ll see over the coming races that that will be a thing that increasingly we put to bed.
Q: (Umberto Zapelloni – Il Foglio) James, can we have some news from the engineer point of view of the first test of Kimi Antonelli on your old Formula 1 cars, if you have something to say?
JA: Well, I have had the great pleasure of listening to the engineers describe the interaction with him. Just a young, enthusiastic driver, very, very fast, metronomic in his pace. Has not been in an F1 car until recently, but made it look like he’d been in one for ages within a lap or two. He came at this generation of cars, the ground effect cars, with an open mind. Yeah, he feels all the same things that you’d expect him to feel. But he’s not sort of polluted by the previous cars. So he just takes them as they are and tells us what he is feeling as weaknesses and strengths. and lets the engineers work to try to improve those things. But he looks like a very promising young driver.
Q: (Daniel Moxon – Daily Mirror) A question for James, please. You mentioned the ebb and flow of staff turnover earlier on. This week we had confirmation that Jerome D’Ambrosio and Loic Serra are heading to Ferrari. Today we learned that there’s another departure as well in the chief aerodynamicist Gioacchino [Vino]. Is there any concern at all over the loss of so many key players in such a short space of time and are you able to explain why these people have decided that now is the time that their future lies elsewhere?
JA: I don’t think there’s any point in me offering a commentary on motivation. Clearly, a team needs to have a critical mass of experienced and good people. And we would not wish to see experienced good people leave us. But we also are gathering experienced and good people at a similar rate. So I guess it’s our job to try and make sure we act in such a way as everybody would rather be with us than anywhere else.
Q: (Carlo Platella – Formula Passion) Yeah, another one. Another question for James. A few races ago, Toto said that Mercedes has a problem with the physics of this car. Do you agree with him? And maybe has the view changed in the last races?
JA: Well, I guess any car that’s not on pole has a problem with its physics, because all of us are basically trying to understand the physics of racing cars better than our competitors. And if we’re not at the head of the pack, then it’s because we’ve done that less well than the others. It’s probably easier for you to judge whether we’re getting on top of our physics by watching whether or not we’re getting close to the front. So, with a bit of luck we’ll be a bit closer here at this weekend by the time the summer break comes along noticeably so and then we can discuss whether or not our physics are improving.
Q: (Edd Straw – The Race) One for James. Obviously, it was around 12 months ago. there was a fairly major car change changing some of the conceptual underpinnings of the car, most of those in terms of what wasn’t visible. But what’s your overview of the progress made since that shift and where you are now? And are you at a point now where you’re confident you’ve got a car that if you just keep working with it, you can get to the level you want to? Or are there still a few fundamentals that need to change or be understood to be able to open up that fruitful development?
JA: So from this last year to this, we shifted a few things that you definitely can’t shift in the middle of a season and you have to do across the winter. And I think those changes were helpful ones. I don’t really think there’s too much in terms of the hard points on the car, the stuff that takes a season, that can only be changed across the winter. There aren’t too many things of those that are crying out for adjustment. And mostly, it’s just a question of hard work to get ourselves in a more respectable place.
Q: (Dan Lloyd – Race Car Engineering) Question for James. To what extent are AI and algorithms being used in the background by Formula 1 teams, perhaps in terms of speeding up background processes like purchasing and production to get upgrades out quicker? Is that something that’s perhaps a bit of a hidden battlefield in the sport at the moment?
JA: I don’t know how hidden it is, but in the area you just mentioned, ERP systems, our own in SAP, are starting to deliver that capability. And I think that when we as Mercedes and the grid in general have organised themselves to exploit that capability, then it will be easier to predict what you might need when and how much it will cost and it’ll be more efficient. But that’s I think a little bit ahead. The areas where it’s already kicking around the place are in aerodynamics, a bit in race strategy and it’s increasingly being used to create surrogate models, to create a filter of ideas, so that you can hopefully run your ideas through a trained machine learning cluster that will give you an idea whether it’s better than your last idea or give you a higher percentage chance that that idea might be slightly better than the baseline. And therefore, if you make that work effectively, then gradually your rate of finding lap time gain will be somewhat steeper. So it’s already in all the teams, and it will gather pace in the seasons to come.
Q: (Samarth Kanal – The Race) Just out of interest, the FIA technical regulations say that some materials can be used and some can’t be used, like beryllium can’t be used in certain manufacturing. So are you exploring new materials in that sense? And if so, which ones? And is there any room for those to be explored in the upcoming technical regulations?
JA: Yeah, the sport has a dilemma with materials. Material development is very, very expensive. And so if we all plough money into finding a material that isn’t generally available, eventually it will become available to all of us and all we will have done is lifted the cost base of the sport. But there’ll be no relative competitiveness along the way. So there’s some good sense in restricting where we can play. There’s also good sense in restricting things that have very good engineering properties, but are very poisonous, for example. You don’t really want to make cars out of them, even though they’d be quick. And so it makes sense to have this list, but it does mean that you’re then working in a smaller field for materials innovation. There is nevertheless still work that goes on, because there is a mechanism to bring materials into that list in case it’s obvious that the world has found materials that would be beneficial in F1, which we’re not having to develop ourselves because the world has done that for us, and we’ll import them in and the cars get better as a consequence. Within the restricted material list itself, there is still room for optimisation and making sure you’re choosing the right thing for the right task, and that’s mostly the playground we all play in.
Source: FIA.com
