19/06/2020
NEWS STORY
It's a fact of life that the car seen when the wraps are removed at the launch bears little resemblance to the car packed away at the end of pre-season testing, and that that car features a number of changes when it heads out on to the track at the season opener.
Though the launch and testing may seem a lifetime ago, Mercedes has revealed that when the W11 rolls out in Austria in two weeks, in good old F1 tradition, it will feature a number of updates.
"If you imagine where the launch car was and the car that would have gone to Australia, that was frozen around about Christmas," says the team's technical boss, James Allison in a video issued by the German team today.
"There was the whole of January, whole of February, March, all making the car quicker in the wind tunnel and also in the design departments," he continues. "We got quite a lot of ideas about how to make it quicker, and quite a lot of those ideas were already in process through the design office before we were forced to shut down nine weeks ago.
"Our challenge now is to make sure that that quarter of a year of development can get off the drawing boards and onto the car as swiftly as possible," he adds. "We hope to have a chunk of that for the first race in Austria, and the season that follows will of course take as much of the development as fast as we can get it onto the car in turn."
The Briton admits that the long break from 'driving in anger' may well have an impact on drivers once they return to work.
"I expect mentally it's tougher for the drivers than for the team, this period of waiting," says the Briton. "For the drivers, all the peaks of emotion are amplified, the highs are higher, the lows are lower.
"To get yourself ready to go at the start of a season, and then have it taken away from you in the way that it was in Melbourne, that's tough I think for the drivers to take.
"It will be a sign of their resilience and competitiveness to see them bristle back to work with all the vim and vigour that is necessary to be right on it from the start. Though I have little doubt both Lewis and Valtteri will be ready to go when it matters in Austria."