Mercedes & Ferrari VS The Rest

[oo7ml]

Hi,

Apologies of this has been posted before.

Mercedes and Ferrari clearly outperform the other 8 teams on a regular basis.

01 - Why are their cars faster than everyone else’s? Is it because they have more money, or do they just happen to have better innovation and technology?

02 - What stops other teams from copying their cars and setup?

03 - How much of their success is down to the actual driver VS a great car?

Thanks in advance for your help.

[TheDeuce]

oo7ml said:

Hi,

Apologies of this has been posted before.

Mercedes and Ferrari clearly outperform the other 8 teams on a regular basis.

01 - Why are their cars faster than everyone else’s? Is it because they have more money, or do they just happen to have better innovation and technology?

02 - What stops other teams from copying their cars and setup?

03 - How much of their success is down to the actual driver VS a great car?

Thanks in advance for your help.

It's money. They have more money to spend on research and developing the car ahead of each season, and yet more money to spend on continued updates throughout the season.

The biggest thing stopping the other teams copying is that by the time they see the cars to copy, they're already effectively just a few days away from the first race. Over the next couple of months some teams will copy certain design elements, but of course in the same time Mercedes and Ferrari are still upgrading too, so it's virtually impossible for anyone to catch up overall.

There are definitely some 'better' drivers out there, and the driver is a significant factor. As for exactly how to split the credit for winning races... that's potentially a big debate! Let's just say that a good driver can't finish on the podium in a slow car, but a not so good driver would stand a reasonable chance in the fastest car

[joefraser]

oo7ml said:

Hi,

Apologies of this has been posted before.

Mercedes and Ferrari clearly outperform the other 8 teams on a regular basis.

01 - Why are their cars faster than everyone else’s? Is it because they have more money, or do they just happen to have better innovation and technology?

02 - What stops other teams from copying their cars and setup?

03 - How much of their success is down to the actual driver VS a great car?

Thanks in advance for your help.

01. That and 1001 other things, marginal gains here and there.

02. They are ground up bespoke builds, impossible.

03. Unknown really, you need both to be good to win consistently.

[oo7ml]

Great, thanks for the reply.

[Kinkell]

They build and own their engines. Ok as do Renault but they have been away from the game and missed the boat compared to their superiors.

[patmahe]

oo7ml said:

Hi,

Apologies of this has been posted before.

Mercedes and Ferrari clearly outperform the other 8 teams on a regular basis.

01 - Why are their cars faster than everyone else’s? Is it because they have more money, or do they just happen to have better innovation and technology?

02 - What stops other teams from copying their cars and setup?

03 - How much of their success is down to the actual driver VS a great car?

Thanks in advance for your help.

1. Yes, you can hire more of the best people and put them into strong, well formed teams. Enable them, potentially have multiple strands of development and pick your best ideas. If you are Torro rosso for example this is more difficult.

2. A car is designed around a philosophy, what works well on a Mercedes, may not work on a Racing point and vice versa. If you simply wait to copy Mercedes, then in 6 months if you're very lucky you will have similar pace to the Mercedes at the time you copied it. Not a great strategy for a team looking to win. It's possibly something Williams could look at, assuming they have the money. They need a B-Spec car as soon as possible if the want to compete this season.

3. I've often considered this question, you hear crazy figures for F1 driver's wages, 10s of millions. If this money was invested into R&D instead and some keen young driver put in the car instead, would the difference be noticeable? Would it increase the team's overall points haul because it should benefit both of your team's cars. It'd be a very interesting topic to get into with someone with the inside track. Unfortunately the people with this knowledge don't talk to the media or fans about it.

[TheDeuce]

patmahe said:

3. I've often considered this question, you hear crazy figures for F1 driver's wages, 10s of millions. If this money was invested into R&D instead and some keen young driver put in the car instead, would the difference be noticeable? Would it increase the team's overall points haul because it should benefit both of your team's cars. It'd be a very interesting topic to get into with someone with the inside track. Unfortunately the people with this knowledge don't talk to the media or fans about it.

On this point, I think the inflated salaries are just down to multiple teams wanting the same driver. All drivers start on a low salary (not really a salary as such, but for the sake of keeping it simple) and then if they have much success, sooner or later the team has to massively increase the salary or the driver will get poached by another team.

I'm sure that even world champions would gladly carry on racing for £1m a year after expenses if that was all that was on offer. But so long as it's an open drivers market, if one team starts throwing insane money to get their choice drivers, then the other teams have no choice but to bid at the same sort of level. I'm sure most teams would prefer the money to go into R&D, it just can't happen though.

The only way to solve it would be to set regulations over drivers pay, perhaps a maximum increase of 10% year on year and 15% if they do move between teams.

Having said all that though, it's also not a big problem in my eyes, one could say it adds to the glamour and star factor surrounding the sports drivers. And spare a thought for the poor drivers, they already have to live in Monaco to avoid paying normal rates of tax, so they must only just be getting by as it is

[Andy S15]

Related to this, I have always wondered why Mercedes seem to be the only team to run with certain concepts - and consistently. They seem to be always running the lowest rake in the field and also the only team to use a more traditional style nose, opposed to the 'thumb' design that everyone else uses, since Toro Rosso dropped theirs a couple of seasons back. Since it seems clear that Merc are consistently using these concepts and getting great success with them, why does literally no other team attempt to copy? I get the idea of being behind the curve if you do, but Merc seem very content to stick with these designs so must have confidence in them. Are they the only team to get these to work? Is high performance 'easier' to obtain with high rake and a thumb nose?

[TheDeuce]

Andy S15 said:

Related to this, I have always wondered why Mercedes seem to be the only team to run with certain concepts - and consistently. They seem to be always running the lowest rake in the field and also the only team to use a more traditional style nose, opposed to the 'thumb' design that everyone else uses, since Toro Rosso dropped theirs a couple of seasons back. Since it seems clear that Merc are consistently using these concepts and getting great success with them, why does literally no other team attempt to copy? I get the idea of being behind the curve if you do, but Merc seem very content to stick with these designs so must have confidence in them. Are they the only team to get these to work? Is high performance 'easier' to obtain with high rake and a thumb nose?

Maybe those concepts ultimately allow better performance in areas that Mercedes care about, but are for some reason horrendously expensive and resource hungry to get working?

If you have an option that will cost you £50m and will bring you 97% of pace performance, and another option that will cost you £150m and bring you 99% pace performance, then for the other teams, they simply can't follow. The nose shape will alter the airflow over the entire car so no one can just copy that one piece, they would have to understand the effect and philosophy behind it's design and apply the same philosophy to every other part of their car. You can see that all they can really 'copy' is an idea, they would still have to throw mega £££ at the idea in terms of R&D to reverse engineer the aero philosophy, over and above whatever they have already spent on developing their current philosophy package to that date.

I suppose short of asking each teams chief engineer the question it's impossible to know exactly what the block is to copying. But clearly they don't feel they can afford to adopt the idea AND make it work for their cars, as there is no other block to them blatantly ripping off what any other constructor comes up with. It happens most seasons in some capacity.

[Andy S15]

TheDeuce said:

Maybe those concepts ultimately allow better performance in areas that Mercedes care about, but are for some reason horrendously expensive and resource hungry to get working?

Agree, at the end of the day, it must be linked to cost. I just find it odd that as the only team to win a C'ship in the hybrid era and the only team to run both a traditional nose and low rake, that not even one other team attempts to replicate their philosophy. Would it not stand to reason that there is some correlation with their success/design concepts which others should be exploring? I've been wondering about this for the last few seasons.

Also, old noses and low rake just looks so much cooler IMO and I'd love to see more of it.

[TheDeuce]

Andy S15 said:

TheDeuce said:

Maybe those concepts ultimately allow better performance in areas that Mercedes care about, but are for some reason horrendously expensive and resource hungry to get working?

Agree, at the end of the day, it must be linked to cost. I just find it odd that as the only team to win a C'ship in the hybrid era and the only team to run both a traditional nose and low rake, that not even one other team attempts to replicate their philosophy. Would it not stand to reason that there is some correlation with their success/design concepts which others should be exploring? I've been wondering about this for the last few seasons.

Also, old noses and low rake just looks so much cooler IMO and I'd love to see more of it.

Maybe it's Mercedes that are wrong, if they copied the thumb design they could be even faster

I too like the low rake stance. It's a good looking car.

[kambites]

I'd imagine that the best drivers also tend to be most appealing to sponsors, so paying a top driver a huge salary might actually be a net financial gain for the team compared to paying a new driver a pittance.

[Andy S15]

TheDeuce said:

Maybe it's Mercedes that are wrong, if they copied the thumb design they could be even faster

Haha, now that is something I hadn't considered!

[markcoznottz]

Alonso was a big name, good for the sport, pretty nice place to be, drive a st car into retirement, but end up with mega wealth. It's also interesting that taking an ex employee of Mercedes like paddy Lowe, when he moved to Williams, no appreciable improvements were seen. I guess you just can't copy a process from another team unless you have the budget to back it up with.

[CoolHands]

Verstappen said in ch4 interview that RB are the fasted developers in the course of the season so he expects them to improve relative to the big 2

[TheDeuce]

CoolHands said:

Verstappen said in ch4 interview that RB are the fasted developers in the course of the season so he expects them to improve relative to the big 2

That's certainly a very bold statement. I wouldn't have said their development outpaces Mercedes. Probably about the same as Ferrari, given that Ferrari sometimes take a step backwards in between moving forwards.