Episode 7: Mid Season Review

It's great having you two here because as a simple driver myself, I'm always fascinated to know how, especially when you have such a massive rule change in Formula One, how chassis and power unit come together and create this magic that we have this year.

I don't know if you...

Yeah, start with you, James.

From a team's point of view here in Brackley, how does it all begin? What were the first processes before...

When you first get the rules coming away.

Well, you've definitely started in the wrong place asking me but simply because the chronology of Getting ready for this a very very challenging year It was definitely a thing led in power unit land The rules were firmed up way earlier for the power units than for the chassis.

So probably actually best off starting in how land learning for the for the beginning of the journey and then I can chip in at the death where we started to have an impact.

Over to you then Hal.

First of all there was a big part of this which was helping to create the regulations with the FIA and that wasn't an entirely straightforward process because you've got a number of different teams, a number of different things that need to be created.

There was a big push to get new manufacturers into the sport.

And so there are a lot of different stakeholders who all kind of were looking for slightly different things from the regulations.

So even before you kind of get the regulation set, there's quite a lot that needs to be thought about.

And you're trying to kind of second guess how it might all end up as you're trying to do a little bit of work yourselves.

Once the regulations have got set up there, I think what I've said on a number of occasions and the way that we really always try to work is to look at the regulations and really try and understand where's the lap time going to come from? What's the specifics of these regulations that you can do the work on? You've only got a certain amount of, to use one of James's sayings, you've only got a certain amount of treasure and you've got to spend it wisely.

And especially with this set of regulations where it was the first time we had a cost cap.

So you've got to make sure you're spending your treasure, spending your resource, spending your cash in the right place to make sure that the lap time is always being looked after.

So that was the first thing is just on the computer and some quite simple sort of simulations done on spreadsheets.

You know, nothing more complicated than that.

Trying to work out, wait a minute, what's the real points where we need to make sure that we really look after well? That's kind of where we started.

So that's it from Mercedes high performance powertrain side of things, HPP.

So then once you have that information, I guess, James, then when does the chassis side start?

Well, so all of what Harold just described, that preceded anything chassis land by a couple of years.

The chassis rules were not even a twinkle in the eye of the FIA at the point where the horse trading was going on for what the PU was going to eventually turn into.

We could see quite early on that this PU rule set was going to need to produce a very different chassis.

because of the way the 50-50 hybrid works.