Mercedes hopes to have upgrades on its Formula One car in time for the Austrian Grand Prix, the opening race of the delayed 2020 season.
Mercedes, winners of the past six world championships, came out of February’s preseason testing looking like the team to beat for another season. The coronavirus pandemic led to the postponement or cancellation of the opening 10 races, with teams observing a lengthy shutdown of their F1 facilities.
Those F1 facilities are operating again in the buildup to the opening race, and Mercedes hopes to bring an improved car to Austria’s Red Bull Ring, which hosts back-to-back races on July 5 and July 12.
“If you imagine where the launch car was and the car that would have gone to Australia [the original season opener in March], that was frozen around about Christmas,” Mercedes technical director James Allison said in a video the team posted to its social channels on Friday.
“There was the whole of January, whole of February, March, all making the car quicker in the wind tunnel and also in the design departments. We got quite a lot of ideas about how to make it quicker, and quite a lot of those ideas were already in process through the design office before we were forced to shut down nine weeks ago.
“Our challenge now is to make sure that quarter of a year of development can get off the drawing boards and onto the car as swiftly as possible. We hope to have a chunk of that for the first race in Austria, and the season that follows will, of course, take as much of the development as fast as we can get it onto the car in turn.”
Last week, Mercedes conducted a two-day test with its 2018 car at Silverstone. The test allowed Mercedes to practice the new procedures in place to stop the spread of coronavirus at the upcoming slate of European races.
Given the economic realities during the pandemic, F1’s smaller teams are unlikely to enjoy the same luxury in terms of upgrades. Haas, who will not be having any test or shakedown of its 2020 car ahead of the first practice session in Austria, are not committing to any upgrades until budgets have been signed off.
“You need to make these decisions now,” Haas boss Guenther Steiner said in a media conference call this week.
“The worst would be to spend the money now and then not have the money to do the upgrades. That is no help. Like any other company, you need to manage this is part of the risk we have got. Its fine, we need to live with that.
“This is an exceptional year, hopefully, for all of us, so we live with it. We’ve learned quite a lot about upgrades — they are never as big as you hope they are, as these days you can do quite a lot on the first car. In our opinion, it’s not a necessity to have them.
“What is really needed for us is not to make mistakes; that’s what we’ve decided and we’ve gone down that road and not risk planning for something we cannot afford. That would be worse, because then we wouldn’t be able to go to the last grands prix and then for sure that wouldn’t give us any points.”
F1 has an eight-race schedule confirmed and is working on finalising it with races outside of Europe. The series expects to have 15 to 18 races by the time it is finalised.