Rumors are floating around that Mercedes might be making a competitor to the Ferrari 488 GTB and McLaren 650s. The rumors currently substantiate very little, suffice it to say if the car is made it could be a mid-engine hybrid supercar, following the German automaker’s F1 car after its dominant form since the 2014 season. What does this mean, exactly? If indeed the car is going to be based around the Mercedes W09, it means pushrod and pullrod suspension, Brembo carbon disc brakes, infamous Pirelli tires and, of course, the PU106 C hybrid engine.
All of this considered, the question if the car is going to be produced morphs into how the hell are they going to whittle down the cost of the car to match the Ferrari 488? Money in F1 is not traditionally talked about explicitly, so, with speculation, the average cost of an F1 car in materials is believed to be around $9 million. This does not include the cost of R&D, which for teams like McLaren, Ferrari and Mercedes is believed to rack up multiple hundreds of millions of dollars. The Mercedes engine, the PU106 C hybrid, is the fastest on the grid and thought to cost about $14 million to develop. If Mercedes wants to put this into a road car, obviously the engineers need to figure some serious cost-savings measures.
This shouldn’t be too difficult, considering F1 engines are made of exotic materials, right? Wrong. The crankcase and block, crank and camshafts, pistons and valves must be made of aluminum and iron-based alloys, according to 2016 F1 regulations. That probably leaves just the R&D to minimize, but that’s going to be difficult too. The PU106 C engine is dead reliable, but it’s a different kind of reliability. An F1 engine needs to be reliable for at least two hours per race weekend, whereas the road-going version, however Mercedes might orchestrate its production, needs to be reliable for multiple years. Of course, on the road, it won’t be taken to redline all of the time.
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Just one race into the Formula One season and unhappy drivers are calling the series’ decision-making “obsolete and ill-structured”, calling for a “restructuring” of its governance.
A rushed decision to change the rules of qualifying, and then scrap those changes after the season-opening Australian Grand Prix last weekend, showed how much F1 is riddled with confusion and uncertainty as it tries to regain popularity.
That was further underlined in another volte-face on Thursday when F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone said the unpopular new qualifying format will remain in place – temporarily – at the Bahrain GP next week.
This comes after four-time champion Sebastian Vettel – a critic of the new qualifying format which underwhelmed spectators and frustrated drivers in Melbourne – joined former champ Jenson Button in demanding better leadership. Both signed an open letter on behalf of the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association (GPDA), along with its chairman Alex Wurz, to express their discontent.
“The drivers have come to the conclusion that the decision-making process in the sport is obsolete and ill-structured and prevents progress being made,” the GPDA said. “We feel that some recent rule changes – on both the sporting and technical side, and including some business directions – are disruptive, do not address the bigger issues our sport is facing, and in some cases could jeopardise its future success.” Changes to qualifying were unpopular. The three qualifying periods remained in place, but instead of having the slowest drivers eliminated at the end of each session, they were dropped one by one every minute and a half.
The last session, Q3, saw the first of the eight remaining drivers eliminated after five minutes until two cars were left for the final minute and a half.
At least, that was the plan. But in Melbourne, cars stayed in the garage way before the finish of Q3 and the exciting finale never materialised.
As a consequence, the series rule-makers – F1 stakeholders led by Ecclestone in conjunction with governing body FIA – were embarrassingly forced to make a u-turn.
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And of course, those numbers don’t really correspond to anything anymore. The Mercedes-AMG C43 is powered by a 3.0-liter twin-turbo V6, putting out 362 horses and 384 lb.-ft. of torque; none of those numbers bears any mathematical relationship to the number 43, but there you have it.
