Driving Force

Despite dominating the field in F1 recently, Mercedes AMG is not resting on its laurels. At its Brackley HQ, changes are afoot to secure even bigger wins – both on the track and on the road.

Words by JASON BARLOW

Mercedes’ factory in Brackley

James Bond’s nemesis Blofeld, Sir Norman Foster and Ridley Scott would all be impressed. Mercedes AMG High Performance Powertrains’ (HPP) HQ is a meld of gleaming modernist architecture and advanced engineering, the bucolic countryside setting underlining the unusualness of the building’s purpose. This is where one of the world’s greatest engines is designed and manufactured.

A Formula One car hangs from a vaulted ceiling in the entrance atrium, and a selection of engines sit on plinths. “There are six departments here,” explains engineering director Andy Cowell as he ushers us through. “Our aim is simple: what can we do to make a racing car go around a circuit faster?”

Blofeld and his minions would appreciate the scale of this place and its logical structure – not to mention its focus on world domination. A string of gantries connects HPP’s different divisions, and viewed from above it looks imperious. “There’s a performance engineering division, an electronics one, and we have guys who develop new concepts before bringing them to life,” Cowell says. “A reliability group then determines if the product is good enough to leave the factory. Engineers are actually a pretty unruly bunch who never really want to commit to something when they can keep on being creative. So there’s a management group whose job it is to get them to commit.”

F1 has a habit of making stars of figures like Cowell: in the past, the sport has canonized the likes of Gordon Murray, John Barnard and Adrian Newey, geniuses all. Since the introduction of the hybrid engine formula in 2014, the Mercedes AMG team has dominated the sport in a way rarely seen since modern F1 began in 1950. Big rule changes historically provide scope for the sharpest brains to find new solutions, and the mild-mannered Cowell and his people really hit the mother lode with HPP’s 1.6-litre hybrid V6 turbo.

Between them, Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg have won 51 races since March 2014, turning the driver’s title battle into an exclusively two-way fight, while Mercedes has obliterated its rivals in the constructors’ championship. So much so, in fact, that the sport’s governing body has effectively pushed the reset button for 2017. The cars are wider, lower and look more aggressive. Pirelli’s tyres are also much bigger, the net result overall being much higher cornering speeds and lap times that look set to improve by five seconds per lap as the season progresses. Mercedes’ executive director Toto Wolff insists the changes “take everything back to zero”, but despite a turbulent winter – newly crowned world champion Rosberg shocked everyone by retiring five days after winning, and technical director Paddy Lowe left a month later – Mercedes, known as ‘the Silver Arrows’, have redoubled their efforts. Winning is difficult in F1; to maintain a streak like this is almost unprecedented. (Ferrari in particular is determined to break Mercedes’ stranglehold.)

“The fastest racing car needs an outstanding driver, great vehicle dynamics, great aerodynamics, and a lot of grunt,” Cowell says. “And that means lots of specialist teams pulling together to look after one car. Then it’s down to tactics, and reacting to events. We want F1 to constantly bring in exciting but relevant new technology, to be a spectacle.”

The key to Mercedes’ recent success is the powertrain, which refers to the various mechanisms that drive the car. There are no fewer than six of these in the current F1 generation powertrain – the 1.6-litre V6 internal combustion unit, the turbo, a motor generator that converts kinetic energy tapped under braking into power for the engine (MGU-K), another that turns heat energy into power for the engine (MGU-H), an energy store to save this power for when it’s needed, and a control box that oversees all the electronics. Now imagine how tough it is getting all those components to ‘talk’ to each other, while withstanding the temperatures generated by an F1 engine during a race.

From 750bhp (brake horsepower – the measurement of a car’s power) in 2014, the V6 engine now produces in excess of 850bhp and may reach 1,000bhp by the end of the season’s 20 races. This is largely thanks to rule changes designed to make the sport more exciting. But anyone who thought these changes might erode Mercedes’ advantage in 2017 should think again. “[The team] has made improvements in every single area,” Andy Cowell noted earlier this year. “The base architecture of our Energy Recovery System is similar to what we started with in 2014, but it’s more efficient. There are improvements in reliability, so we can run it harder for longer.” Cooling – a vital process in any high-powered engine, but especially on these complex hybrids – has also been optimized. “The MGU-H and MGU-K are completely new. It’s a big evolution.”

Mercedes’ factory in Brackley

Internal procedures have also been tightened up, following some controversial reliability problems for Lewis Hamilton last season. “There are some very big changes in Brixworth, from the way we do our research, the way that we do our concept reviews, the way we work with suppliers, our manufacturing and the way we assemble parts,” Cowell confirms.

Under current regulations, each driver on the grid is allowed a maximum of four engines per season. Mercedes HPP manufactures a total of 50 engines per season. Some of these go to Force India and Williams and they also need units for testing, as well as the ones that are pushed to the limit during evaluation. While the blocks are cast in a Daimler facility in Stuttgart, everything else – down to the tiniest screw – is made in-house. F1’s flirtation with exotic materials in engines, such as beryllium, was ended by the FIA years ago due to safety concerns and prohibitive costs for smaller manufacturers, but an F1 engine’s internals are still supremely clever, a tall tale of millimetre-thick tolerances balanced against high-revving repeatability and reliability. Three different grades of aluminium are used depending on which component they’re destined for, and what sort of temperature or kinetic load that component has to cope with. The pistons, for example, are rather busy during a race weekend, so they’re stronger.

We've been working night and day to make ourselves competitive. We'll always keep the hunger, the inner unrest. We want to win. On track, on the road, everywhere.

Back at Mercedes’ HQ, an HPP supercomputer, overseen by 20 experts who run constant simulations, measures the variables and optimizes the engine’s performance depending on the track. Every engine made by HPP is also strenuously bench-tested. During my visit, a simulation of the much-loved Spa circuit in Belgium was being conducted; computers monitored the engine’s vital systems as it mimicked lap after punishing lap.

During a race weekend, a team of HPP experts will be monitoring the performance of the six engines in real time from a control room in the factory, wherever the F1 circus is in the world. About 60 parameters are constantly measured on the engines, a further 50 on the Engine Recovery System. The feedback is triangulated between the circuit, Brixworth and the other teams’ HQs in real time. The car industry is obsessed with connectivity; it simply doesn’t get any more connected than this.

Should the Grand Prix not go according to plan, there’s a Tuesday morning ‘fault meeting’. “It’s very aggressive,” Cowell says. “There are maybe 15 of us sitting in a room. You can’t sit there and say, ‘Oh, it’s a one-off, it won’t happen again’. It’s self-policing, and that can be very uncomfortable.”

The new F1 order is determined by fuel efficiency rather than power delivery; the most efficient car will win the Grand Prix, and it’ll do so by using 35 per cent less fuel than in 2013. Technical concepts such as thermal efficiency and reduced frictional losses are examples of the F1 tech-to-road transfer, although the 2017 season is pointedly putting the emphasis back on sheer entertainment, thanks to the faster, better-looking cars, whose increased capability will in turn ask much more of the drivers’ skill – and stamina.

Lewis Hamilton driving for Mercedes AMG in 2017

But for a company like Mercedes- Benz, the benefit of F1 goes deeper still. As the performance subdivision AMG celebrates its 50th anniversary, Mercedes is planning to unveil the ultimate road car at the Frankfurt motor show in September. As chairman and CEO Dieter Zetsche recently told me: “The success of AMG is a significant contributor to the perception of Mercedes as much younger, cooler and more relevant. The [Project One] hypercar will be the missing link, legitimizing the integration of AMG with the Formula One team. It will be limited production, and ideally we want it to be sold out before the first one is delivered. It will be perceived as the ultimate sports car.”

AMG’s straight-talking boss Tobias Moers adds: “It was very clear to us that it could not be a V8 or V12 hybrid car. It should be something really special. Who else, other than us, could try to bring a Formula One engine to the street? I called Andy [Cowell] and said, ‘Can you do it?’ He said, ‘Give me two months’. And then the answer was yes.’’

Andy Cowell (left) and Toto Wolff

But let’s give the last word to Ola Källenius, the Mercedes board member for research and development. “We are crazy enough occasionally to say, ‘Let’s do it’. We are putting a Formula One powertrain into a road car: not an F1-inspired or derived engine. We’ll have more batteries, and we’ll probably have a higher total power output than we do in the F1 car, but it is the F1 powertrain, full stop.

“The last three years have been unbelievable, almost like a dream. I visited the team a few weeks ago and sensed an atmosphere of hunger almost as if we’d won no championships in the past three years. The rule changes are effectively a ‘control-alt-delete’, a start again. But we’ve been working night and day to make ourselves competitive. We’ll always keep the hunger, the inner unrest. We want to win. On track, on the road, everywhere.”