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Mercedes released a Q&A session with James Allison! Mercedes’ Technical Director answers questions about the new car, the 2024 season, and more!
Can you describe the design approach that the team has taken to the W15?
The design of any car is an iterative process. And a long one at that. It stretches back to last year. A new car enables the team to make bigger alterations that are not possible during the year. These are decisions that are taken during the preceding summer.
But the main approach is unchanging from year-to-year, and that is to try to deal with the things that you’ve identified as weaknesses on your current car. Those weaknesses are revealed most starkly when the competition starts. But you get a reasonably good idea quite early in the year of what the Achilles heel might be of a car. From there it is about balancing out working to improve those Achilles heels and building on what has worked well. You look to your available resources from varying departments and get them to focus their attentions on fixing the issues. As time goes by you can start taking more and more people off the current car and divert their efforts towards the next one.
What would you say the major areas of focus have been with the W15?
A big focus has been on improving the previous car’s unpredictable rear axle, which the drivers often referred to as spiteful. We have worked on that to try and create a car that is reassuring to the drivers. At the beginning of a corner when you’re hard on the brakes and turning in, the rear needs to feel rock solid. And then as you get towards the apex, the car needs to feel progressively more nimble, and eager, to turn. We have been trying to build that into the car.
We’ve also worked hard to create a less draggy car, and to add performance in the corners. There’s also been some housekeeping on areas in which we had room for improvement, including the DRS effect, and pit stop performance. We were always very good at delivering a pit stop in a repeatable time, which is the key thing for a pit stop. The repeatable time that we could do our pit stops in was still three to four tenths slower than the best teams, though. So hopefully we will have moved in the right direction there.
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How do you approach trying to make those improvements with a new car?
Bigger layout changes are not freed up by no longer having the hassle of racing, you make those big layout changes prior to the summer. So, when we talk about a layout change, you’re generally talking about where the engine sits in the chassis, what geometry of rear suspension you’re going to have on the gearbox and what changes you are going to make to the part that contains the driver. Those are all three things that are hypothetically doable in the middle of a year but come at such huge opportunity cost that you would never contemplate it. But nevertheless, you need to commit to them in the preceding summer. The off-season is about proving to yourself on your internal rigs and simulators that those pieces are what you hope they might be; that it looks like it will deliver on your hopes.
Are you pleased with the progress and results you’ve season so far?
I feel like we have delivered on all the things we said we wanted to do. Some aspects are unbounded and therefore you can never be fully satisfied. We will not know until we run the car truly. But I think we can say that we feel like we have worked well. Formula One is a relative game. Whether we’ve worked well enough to be competitive, only time will tell. We do not know what everyone else has done.
How has the development of this car been different to previous years?
A new chassis and a gearbox were standard for every year, pre-cost cap. And there’ll be several other teams who have done both things in a single year. But the cost cap does force you to pick and choose your battles, and there’s no doubt that having a new outer casing as well as at the same time as having a new chassis are two big projects that are going to take a chunk of our available firepower. That is what we have done this year. It does mean that in other parts of the car we have not tried to reinvent the wheel. But it has allowed us to undertake a couple of big projects without breaking the bank and we believe that this is a good and important use of our efforts.
How much work has gone into areas of the car that are not visible to the naked eye?
Most of a Formula One car is not visible. It has always been like that, but even more so with this current generation of cars where so much of the performance comes from how the floor interacts with the road. Everything you see above the waterline are the ugly, inefficient conditioners that try to help the floor do its good work. Whether or not a car is effective is down to how well, aerodynamically at least, that floor is permitted to behave.
Do you have an idea of what the next few months of development may look like already?
Most of the lap time you can put on a car comes from aerodynamics during a season, but precisely what we find and in what area is still unknown. The aerodynamic department is, at this stage of the year, planning to put a good amount of effort in to front wings, rear wings, floor, brake drums, brake ducts, bodywork, all of which could produce things that might arrive for the European season. Several of those programmes will not come to fruition, but that is just the nature of experimentation. But if you try hard enough over a wide enough range of experiments, then enough of them will come good in that time scale and there should be a decent package to put on the car by the time we return to Europe.
From a personal perspective, how much do you enjoy this time of year?
It is a bit like waiting for Christmas. It is exciting. You want it to arrive, and you want the days to fly by. You also know that the Christmas Day opening of those presents might bring not bring you all the good fortune you wish for. It’s not a relaxing time of year, but it is very exhilarating. I would not want it any other way and, having not been in the Technical Director’s seat for a couple of seasons, I’m beginning to remember the usual feelings of anticipation and trepidation.
Source: Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team
