Mercedes Slow But Steady During Test

February 8th, 2010

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VALENCIA, Spain — Mercedes debuted its 2010 car at the Valencia test last week. Last year, the new Brawn blew the competition away when it made its first appearance just a few weeks before the first race. The MGP W01 is based on last year’s championship winning Brawn, but the new cars debut was a little less spectacular.

“There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the car,” team chief Ross Brawn said. “The drivers are reasonably happy with the balance. This (Valencia) is not a great track for really assessing the car, but it is a useful start. Nothing suggests that there is anything strange but it is far too early to judge how all the cars compare.”

- US F1 is close to naming the teammate to Jose Maria Lopez. The Spanish media is saying that it will be Spain’s Adrian Valles, 23, who won the 2009 Superleague championship.

- The FIA has again tweaked the points breakdown for the top 10 finishers in each race. The finalized version for the top 10 finishers is: 25, 18, 15, 12, 10, 8, 6, 4, 2 and 1. To make drivers go for the win rather than cruise for points, the gap between first and second is larger than in earlier versions.

- In an attempt to spice up the show this season, a new rule will require the top 10 qualifiers to start the race on the same set of tires they qualified on. This means that the team will have to choose between qualifying higher up the grid with soft tires but having to make an early pit stop or starting further back but being able to stay out longer on the harder compound.

Still, Williams tech boss Sam Michael predicts most drivers will pit only once during a race — maybe twice — and definitely not three times.

- The Valencia test gave the teams the opportunity to try out the new Bridgestone front tire, which is 20 millimeter (.78 of an inch) narrower than the 2009 specification. “It’s much easier to overload them because there’s less surface on the asphalt,” Robert Kubica said. “In the high speed (corners) the tendency is to have more understeer.”

- The Serbian Stefan GP team does not have an entry in the 2010 championship, but that has not stopped the team from shipping equipment to Bahrain for the season opening race. The team plans to test its Toyota-based Formula One cars in Portugal this week.

- Virgin Racing was the first of the new teams to unveil and test its 2010 car. The VR-01 was developed completely with CFD and never saw a wind tunnel.

“There is a great deal of skepticism about our all-CFD approach,” designer Nick Wirth said. “But we are competing in a sport that is undergoing significant change having come face to face with today’s harsh economic realities. Under resource restriction, convention will become too costly and necessity really will be the mother of invention.”

- The teams and the FIA have agreed to ban double decker rear diffusers in 2011. Pity that was not done prior to the 2009 season as it would have saved the teams the huge amounts of money they spent developing the diffusers and aero downforce levels would have been reduced, as was the original intention of the 2009 rules.