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MERCEDES SHAKEDOWN AT SILVERSTONE

Mercedes shakedown at Silverstone - Photo: Supplied

By Bruce Williams

Mercedes shakedown at Silverstone - Photo: Supplied

Mercedes shakedown at Silverstone – Photo: Supplied

Reigning world champion Lewis Hamilton and his teammate Valtteri Bottas both drove the new 2020 Mercedes during a shakedown at Silverstone.

By DAN KNUTSON

The official name of the car is the Mercedes-AMG F1 W11 EQ Performance. “EQ Performance” stands for the brand’s future Mercedes-AMG performance hybrid models.

It was a busy time during the off-season at the Mercedes chassis and power unit factories as team members developed, manufactured, assembled and tested new components and systems for the new car. Over 100,000 parts were checked in inspection with 40,000 components tested in non-destructive testing to make sure they were up to the standards the team requires; over 8,000 drawn parts created and put through the manufacturing and testing process.

The team has looked at a myriad of areas to improve the car and has changed the vast majority of the over 10,000 parts of the car to extract more performance

“It’s a real privilege for Valtteri and myself to be the only people who get to drive this machine and I’m really looking forward to stretching its legs”, said Hamilton. “I’ve been in constant communications with the engineers, trying to keep an eye on everything that was happening at the factory. Today is a really exciting day – finally seeing in person what this team has worked towards so hard. As a driver, you’re just itching to get back into the car.”

Bottas made a number of trips to the factory to talk with the engineers.

“It’s been really interesting for me to get more and more involved, learning about all the new features of our weapon for this year’s fight,” he said. “Developing and building a new car is never straight-forward, it’s a huge effort by every single team member to deliver this year on year. Now things really kick off.”

In 2019, the team brought a significant upgrade to the car after the first week of testing in Spain that changed the look of the Melbourne car quite significantly compared to the launch car. This year the race trim will be much closer to the car that made its debut at Silverstone.

“We will still have upgrades for Melbourne that will come in the second week of testing,” said technical director James Allison, “but the ‘entire new car’ approach of 2019 won’t feature. Last year, the regulations were changed quite significantly, and they were decided quite late in the year. Under those circumstances, doing a launch car and a week two car gave us the chance to build the maximum amount of learning into our Melbourne car. With the regulations being more mature this year and with the opening stab of the 2020 development already being at the same level as the finish of last year’s car, repeating last year’s approach would not make sense.”

Although Mercedes has won six consecutive drivers’ and constructors’ world championships, the team is taking nothing for granted about the upcoming season that begins with the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne on March 15.

“The atmosphere this year is very calm, very focused – we all know that there’s a job to do and results to be delivered in order to meet our own expectations, so we’re working hard to try and prepare in the best way possible,” said team principal Toto Wolff. “We feel no sense of entitlement to win races or championships, we know that we need to fight extremely hard for that as we had to in every year. This has been our mindset from the beginning.”

The new Mercedes, along with the new cars from the other nine F1 teams, will undergo six days of testing in Spain before being shipped to Melbourne.

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