Mercedes GP - promising future?
 

After buying cash-strapped Brawn GP, Mercedes started the 2010 season in a promising way with Rosberg collecting 2 podiums and positioning second in WDC for a moment. Since then car performance has gradually been deteriorating all the time, which has recently meant getting lapped by Top3 teams and sometimes getting beaten by other midfielders, like Force India.

In 2011 Mercedes has finally turned its attention to the deepest problem and started improving its engineering excellence.
Costa, Willis join Mercedes GP as it strengthens technical team - F1 news - AUTOSPORT.com
In addition to Bob Bell they have signed Aldo Costa and Geoff Willis. All notable names. Besides all Bell and Costa managed to win all constructors championships during 2005-2008 as technical directors. Does this mean that Mercedes is finally going to halt its backwards slide and will actually start improving? Do they have title-challenging potential in long-term? Perhaps new rules in 2014 will tell us...

Mercedes' actions remind me a bit of what their predecessor Honda did in 2007, when as a consequence of a horrible season they made a lot of new signings, headed by Brawn. Two years later it all culminated in winning the championships...

I think equally significant is that "The board has signed off on an expansion plan to take the team up to the limits imposed by the Resource Restriction Agreement". Significant in that it shows that so far Mercedes has been funding the team below that level.

Doesn't 2009 prove that the team has (or had) sufficiently smart people, given enough resources? I know Honda spent unprecedented amounts of money, but Toyota proved that huge budgets alone can't make you a championship contender. You still need the right people.

I am deeply puzzled by Mercedes, apart from the fact that behind the wheel it has one possibly over-rated and one probably past-it driver. What was lost in the transition from Brawn to Mercedes, except the two drivers Brawn had, and what did the company expect to gain if indeed it was effectively under-funding the team? Jackie Stewart suggested a while back that Brawn benefited early in 2009 from the lingering effects of the Honda money, and that Merc's funding would take some time to truly kick in. Well, we're still waiting...

No, it proves they got lucky with a loophole in the rules and used big money to milk it for all it's worth. Once others had it later in the season they dropped back to their usual midfield points scorer position. Lets face it, since becoming BAR in 1999 the team have always been average midfield runners, with the exception of 2 seasons, 2004 and 2009 - we know the story of 2009 but in 2004 the designer was Geoff Willis so I think somebody has woken up to the fact that he is their best chance right now. Personally I think that whole team is just a bunch of average people who ride on this false image of a top team, and the biggest problem IMO is their CEO Nick Fry, who's got to be the biggest BS talker I've ever seen in F1.

You don't get lucky with loopholes in the rules. You have to be clever to exploit them and do so legally. Ross Brawn managed to do both.

I think the key sentence there is 'had'. How many of the designers of the 2009 car are still there? How many were poached by other teams?

Even with the effects of the double diffuser taken out the 2009 was excellent, outpacing both the Williams and Toyota that were similarly designed around that feature completely.

I know its unfashionable to give manufacturers credit but one of Ross Brawn's achievements was to get Honda's considerable R/D resources to work efficiently with the team and a lot of work that went onto the 2009 car wasn't even carried out in Brackley but in Japan.

Went Honda left Brackley lost financial support but also this huge R/D resource. Mercedes hasn't done the same as Honda and has merely taken over financial control, leaving the team separate from its own engineering pool. In effect Mercedes F1 is competing with less backing than Honda F1 did and its slipping back as a result.

To say nothing of what appears to have been Honda's generous attitude in allowing the team to still function while a buyer was being sought.

You don't get lucky with loopholes in the rules. You have to be clever to know how to hide them and do so legally. Ross Brawn managed to do both. That sounds more like some things people used to say http://www.motorsportforums.com/imag...ies/tongue.gif

Again I think Toyota are the perfect counter-example. They had the double decker diffuser before Brawn did. And lots of money. But it did them little good. Williams had a double diffuser from the start of the season too; it was clearly no guarantee of success.

I think the underlying reason Brawn fell back was lack of money to continue developing the car. If they had decent funding, they could have been developing other aspects of the car while others were scrambling to catch up with the diffuser idea.

Not me, I hasten to add!

Toyota is the perfect counter-example to almost everything — the need for bags of money, the need for a double diffuser... But maybe there is a similarity. The deep-seated problems with Toyota's F1 effort are generally regarded to have been higher up the company. Could it be that Mercedes has similar failings?

Did Brawn as a whole fall back, or was it just that Button fell off the pace?

Nico - over rated - really http://www.motorsportforums.com/imag...s/rolleyes.gif

Part of Toyota's problems were its drivers, which reminds me wtf was Trulli doing at the restart at Singapore he gave SV loads of extra lead.

Not sure how long Mercedes will be happy being beat by its 'customer' teams?

Driving a Lotus! http://www.motorsportforums.com/imag...ies/tongue.gif

Aye, but he hung back loads thus gifting SV a massive advantage

The smallest of Toyota`s problem were the drivers
Yeah, because he was actually racing Vettel for position, right?

He probably didn't want to disadvantage himself by being in Vettels dirty air.

This would probably be exaggerated by Vettel using KERS.

Based on what exactly?

No he wasn't but that doesn't mean he should hold back several car lengths. Have you just taken up watching motor sport by any chance?

Because the organization was sick and was never going to get anywhere.

No he wasn't but that doesn't mean he should hold back several car lengths. Have you just taken up watching motor sport by any chance? No, but have you just recently been housebroken?

Without really talented drivers hard to say for sure. Had Schumacher driven for them, who knows?

Just you don't seem to fully understand the sport. Was it the grid girls, the slammed suspension, pretty colour schemes, smell of Cazzy R that drew you in?

Ralf did drive for them, dumbo.
If you mean Michael, well, he could just have been a bit faster than Ralf, but that is it. He wouldnt have made the car faster, he wouldnt have cured the leadership problems at the helm of the team and the team would still have been a mess. Maybe he would have lucked into one win somehow, but that is far from given.

Just you don't seem to fully understand the sport. Was it the grid girls, the slammed suspension, pretty colour schemes, smell of Cazzy R that drew you in? Grid girls.