For Brawn, Mercedes GP is closing the gap on the top teams
Not very competitive for two seasons, the Mercedes team is not where it should be. A situation that the team management recognizes while highlighting some progress. This is particularly the case with Ross Brawn, technical director of the Silver Arrows.
With more than 300 points behind Red Bull, but especially 200 behind McLaren and 135 behind Ferrari, Mercedes GP is far off the mark. Often considered among the top teams, meaning teams capable of contending for victory mainly due to a substantial budget and significant experience in motor racing, the star-marked manufacturer disappoints. Built on the foundations of the promising Brawn GP, the team has not been able to reverse the trend of the second half of the 2009 season during which the performances of the BGP 001 stagnated.
Returned to compete for victory, the Stuttgart company is clearly not in a position to hope for more than the honorary places, as evidenced by Michael Schumacher’s fourth place in Canada, in challenging conditions. For Ross Brawn, the team director, the work seems to be paying off: “We are still working very hard. The most interesting thing is that we conduct a sort of analysis after each race and generally we are getting closer, slowly.”
« Not as fast as we would like, obviously, because the competition is intense between the top teams. They are working fiercely to improve their situation and we are also trying to catch up with them » notes the Briton. « On what we can call “adjusted times”, when you take into account the tires, the fuel, all sorts of things, we have reduced the gap, but not enough yet ».
Brawn still admits that some phases of the development could have been better approached without questioning the work done: There are things we would have liked to do differently, like the blown diffuser or the technologies around the exhaust, which we didn’t look into early enough. There are certain things we did to optimize the car without these technologies that we might not have been able to achieve with.
The director of Mercedes GP is resolutely optimistic about the team’s capabilities and is betting heavily on the Resource Restriction Agreements (RRA) in F1: « The infrastructure must be in place before the workforce can be increased. And I think we have strengthened the team’s structure. It’s always nice to do things well with the smallest possible team, that’s the purpose of the limit imposed by the Resource Restriction Agreements, and we want to move this limit. At the same time, other teams are in a phase of reduction because they are beginning their descent towards the RRA limit. So, in 2011, the teams that are larger still have an advantage while waiting to reach the limits of these agreements ».
