Today’s launch at the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart was a team and livery launch – not, unfortunately, the launch of their 2010 car. For that, we will have to wait until 1 February when the MGP W01 will make its track debut at Valencia.
Nevertheless even without a new car on display the first (sort-of) launch of the new season was still enough to bring down the Mercedes GP website. McLaren is planning to live stream the launch of their MP-25 at Vodafone UK’s headquarters in Newbury on Friday January 29. I hope their servers are up to it…
Still, it was a chance to see what the new car’s paint will look like and also for Michael to say how excited he is to be driving for Mercedes-Benz again and how it is a “dream come true” for Nico. It will be very interesting to watch the dynamic between these two drivers once they get on track.
The new livery looks great: Mercedes’s traditional silver with flashes of green for new sponsor Petronas. On the nose and other parts of the car, the silver paint has been removed to allow traces of black carbon fibre show through. This is a nice touch – a reminder of the first Silver Arrow of 1934.
There is a (probably apocryphal) story about how the 1934 Mercedes Silver Arrows racing cars got their colour. Before the introduction of sponsorship, racing cars had always been painted in the traditional colour for their country; Britain was British Racing Green, France was French Blue and Italy was, of course, Rosso Corsa. German cars were painted White.
From 1934 onwards a maximum weight limit of 750kg was introduced and Mercedes-Benz found that their W25 weighed 751kg. After puzzling over what they could do to lose weight, racing manager Alfred Neubauer came up with the idea of scraping off all the paint to leave the silver aluminium exposed. This supposedly saved the 1kg required and the Silver Arrows were born.
Images: Mercedes GP
November 12th, 2009
David
We have covered some rare and exotic racing cars for sale on f1buzz before but if you missed out on picking up Jenson Button’s old Honda here is another chance to buy some Formula One history.
Michael Schumacher’s old Benetton B194 that he drove to his first World Championship in 1994 is on eBay and the current bid is a bit over 2.5 million (+ 10,000 postage.)
The B194 was designed by Rory Byrne specifically to suit Michael Schumacher’s driving style although he would later comment that it was quite tricky to drive being prone to sudden unexpected oversteer.
1994 was one of the most controversial and tragic seasons in Formula One’s history. Like Jenson Button in 2009, Schumacher won six of the first seven races. The other teams were a bit suspicious of this and following an FIA investigation it was discovered that Benetton had illegal launch control software on the car but as it could not be proved it was ever used the team faced no punishment.
The eBay listing includes “a laptop with software for configuration of the race car” but it doesn’t mention anything about launch control…
Schumacher would later be disqualified from the British Grand Prix for ignoring a black flag and also stripped of his win in Belgium for excessive wear on the skid block but it is the final race of the season in Adelaide that this car is most remembered for. Schumacher’s infamous ramming of Damon Hill at the Flinders Street corner forced both drivers out of the race and sealed the Championship for Schumacher.
Image: Williams
Lotus F1 Racing, the Malaysia-based team granted the 13th entry in the 2010 Formula One World Championship, has revealed a scale model of its new Formula One car.
The model, a product of the recent collaboration between Lotus F1 Racing Chief Technical Officer Mike Gascoyne and the team’s technical partners, will be used for wind tunnel testing.
Considering the team’s application was only approved a month ago they seem to be making remarkable progress although, as Gascoyne says, the car has already been in development for some time:
The start of any windtunnel testing is an important step in the development of a new Formula 1 car, but it is particularly exciting for us as we continue preparations for our first season. It has been a very busy time since our entry was confirmed by the FIA.
We had been working on the entry for several months so we already had aspects of the team infrastructure in place; the finances, the factory and the top management. Once our entry was confirmed in mid?September, we were able to accelerate our recruitment and car development process and this is really where we are at now.
While other teams have started development on their 2010 cars, Lotus is the first to release any pictures. We will have to wait until next year to see the final paint job (and I know it’s not really the same team) but I hope they go with the old black and gold livery of the John Player Special years.
As we posted last week, Nick Heidfeld is wearing a special helmet design for his home Grand Prix this weekend but he is not the only German on the grid and he is not the only one who brought a new helmet to the Nürburgring.
There are five German drivers and three of them will be wearing new lids.
Sebastian Vettel, who seems to like changing his helmet design, is wearing a new silver version while Heidfeld’s helmet was designed by a fan who won a competition on his website.
Timo Glock’s design came from a rather younger fan, though. Panasonic ran a ‘Kids School’ competition to design a helmet for Timo to wear at the German Grand Prix and at the British Grand Prix, Glock studied the entries and selected a winner; six-year-old Tom Luca Hoffmann from Bad Lippspringe, around 400km north east of the Nürburgring.
Tom’s design features Glock driving his Toyota past cheering fans. Glock said:
I was very impressed with Tom’s drawing because it is quite detailed even though he is only a young kid; that’s why I chose it. I’m looking forward to racing with it in front of my home fans and hopefully it will be a lucky charm!
Both Heidfeld and Glock will be auctioning their helmets for charity after the race.
Codemasters will be releasing their new Formula One video game for Wii and PSP later this year, followed by versions for PS3, XBox 360 and PC in 2010, but if you just can’t wait that long Brawn GP have released their own racing game for iPhone and iPod Touch.
Imaginatively called Brawn GP Racing, it is the first Formula One game for the iPhone and iPod Touch and is available from the iTunes App Store.
The game also ties in with a competition where you can win a Mercedes SL, the idea being that the faster your lap time the more competition entries you get.
The game only features one track at the moment; a strange circuit somewhere in central London featuring every famous London landmark the developers could pack in. As you scream around what might be Hyde Park, everything from Tower Bridge and the London Eye to Big Ben and Buckingham Palace slides past.
More tracks will be added throughout 2009 supposedly inspired by real circuits like Silverstone, Monza and Monaco. There is also a news section and a gallery where you can save pictures to use as wallpaper.
The game itself is mildly amusing. The graphics are quite nice and the car sounds good but the handling is tricky. It seems to drive more like a BMW than a Brawn. I found the car either understeering off one side of the track or oversteering off the other. There is an auto-acceleration mode but strangely it doesn’t also auto-brake so it is of dubious help.
With only one track at the moment, £2.39 seems a bit steep but I guess if you win a Mercedes SL the game will have paid for itself…
F1 Buzz rating: 
