Mercedes’ team boss Ross Brawn not worried about his team’s performance – Formula 1 news
Team Mercedes’ boss Ross Brawn recently stated that he is ‘unflustered’ about the performance gap between the new Mercedes and their rivals that is the top running teams in the sport namely Red Bull Racing, McLaren and Ferrari.
The team was able to score the fastest times during two different days of the pre-season test sessions of the 2011 Formula 1 season that took place recently. However, Ross admitted that the team’s new car W02 is still off the pace and they are not getting
the results they were aiming for currently.
“It's a fair statement. We are well aware of the pace of our current car, the distance to the current front runners and the reasons for this, which include the compromises brought about by our cooling issues,” he told Mercedes’ official website.
He claims that the team’s intention was always to launch their new car with a fairly basic specification as compared to the rest of the teams on the grid so that the team could focus on its upgrades more easily. However, he is happy that the team is aware
of the ‘facts’ and they know what to do in order to improve their car. He claims that he is comfortable with the team’s current position and he is expecting some major developments in the near future.
“The biggest challenge for us so far has been a cooling problem. The short-term modifications that we made to the launch-specification car cost a reasonable amount of performance. The solution has been incorporated into the bodywork design for our upgrade
package and will recover that performance before the first race,” he said.
Other than that, the team has been forced to cut its extra cooling holes in their new chassis during the recent pre-season test sessions in order to avoid overheating. Brawn believes that this problem will be resolved after the team upgrades at the final
pre-season test session that is expected to take place in Barcelona instead of Bahrain now.
He believes that it is still too early to vow their fans that team Mercedes would be challenging for the win at the first race which is now expected to take place on March 27, 2011 in Australia instead of Bahrain.
However, it would be interesting to see how they perform at the final pre-season test session in Barcelona as the team will apply its new upgrades on the W02. After that, the final shape of the car until the first race in Australia would be more visible
and it would be interesting to see the difference between Mercedes and its rivals.
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