Mercedes feared being “eaten up” by their rivals had they continued to go conservative with the 2020 car, technical director James Allison says.
Despite their tremendous success in recent years, the Brackley-based team has been known to be quite safe with their cars, sticking to a philosophy which they know works and optimising it.
This year’s W11, however, is different in that many areas have been pushed a lot harder for aerodynamic gain, something that has already been illustrated by Valtteri Bottas’ impressive lap time last week at the first pre-season test, which was only three-tenths off his pole time for last year’s Spanish Grand Prix.
“The temptation for us was just to keep polishing that one [the W10], after all, it finished the season really strongly and it was developing very fast all the way through the year, so there was still lots of opportunities to make that one quicker,” Allison commented in a Mercedes YouTube video.
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“That conservative approach was very, very tempting but, in the end, we decided that wouldn’t be enough.
“We were feeling the breath of our opponents on our shoulders. We know their hunger and we know that if we don’t do something impressive with this car, they will eat us up and leave us behind.
“So, we decided that we would make a car that was aggressive.
“Despite the fact that there is no change in the regulations, we would take every part of the car and see if we could challenge ourselves to make it better.”
And one area Mercedes has particularly made gains in with the W11 over the W10 is the rear suspension, as Allison explained.
“You’re not going to see all the detail, but I can tell you that the rear suspension on this car is extremely adventurous,” he claimed.
“We have put into the back, specifically on the lower rear wishbone, we have put a new geometry in there, a new geometry that gives us more aerodynamic opportunity, allows us to get more downforce on the car.”
As a result of it all: “We have got a car here that is streaks ahead of that one in terms of downforce,” Allison continued.
“We have got a car here whose development slope has kicked up, is steeper than the one that we finished last year’s car with, in that very, very good car from 2019.
“And we’ve got a car here that we hope will be fertile ground to develop strongly all the way through the 2020 season.”
All of this is before we get to the DAS (Dual Axis Steering) system which captivated everyone when it was debuted last week, and just goes to show how hard it will be for Ferrari or Red Bull to knock Mercedes off their perch.