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Mercedes to introduce all-new power unit for 2018
TJ13 comment – Could Mercedes being wiping the slate clean for 2018? Perhaps, but no doubt they’ll be evolving the architecture rather than radically departing from it. Perhaps a policy Honda might’ve done well to learn from 12 months ago?
Mercedes Engine boss Andy Cowell – “We’ve got ideas to reduce the friction in pretty much every area of the power unit, or the losses in electrical systems,”
“Every time you do an engine, every time you do a phase update you’ve always learned.
“So you freeze the concept, you do the work, you do the prove-out, you go racing and all the way along that journey it’s intensely frustrating because you’re learning but you cannot incorporate into that phase without corrupting the quality fundamentally.
“So it’s ensuring that we do have a learning culture that observes and learns and reflects and then remembers that so that then, when it’s time to put the next concept together, we’ve got a whole load of ideas and a lot of it is small, marginal gains on well-trodden areas.
“Some of it is big, fundamental bits of learning, combustion progress, friction reduction, new materials that unlock areas where we’ve been struggling with reliability. And sometimes it’s just a surprise”
“There’s still gains to be had,
“It’s a plethora of marginal gains, five millisecond gains. Then there’s those nice surprises where you thought north would give you 2kW and actually it’s south that gives you 2kW.
“It has just been about doing those great experiments and that’s where the test facility is important.
“You need to think about what it is you’re trying to measure but you need a very impressive dyno with incredible sensors and good test methodology to genuinely detect those gains and to pick them out from the noise of general testing.”
Remember the 2014 Lotus ‘Tusk’ nose? Caterham had planned to run a similar design
Instead we had this… Not sure what’s worse!
Grosjean tips ‘very strong’ McLaren in 2018 (GMM)
Haas driver said that the works team of McLaren’s new engine supplier – Renault – has “developed the project well and is already in front of us”
“McLaren will be very strong. They have huge resources and probably the biggest structure in Formula 1.”
“The Renault is a respectable engine – they’ve had reliability problems but in terms of power they are there now.”
“The bigger question is about Williams, Force India, us and Toro Rosso with their new power unit. I think McLaren will be there with Red Bull, then there will be Renault.”
Raikkonen’s race engineer Dave Greenwood leaves Ferrari for WEC and former F1 team Manor Racing
Former chief engineer at Marussia since 2012, Greenwood left to join Ferrari ahead of the ’15 season and is now set to return to his former team, this time in the WEC LMP1 catagory.
