The real secret of Mercedes' success

There's rarely a golden bullet in Formula 1. Recent weeks have been dominated by talk of what might be the single factor that's helped Mercedes produce such a dominant car this season.

A fair amount of fuss has been made of the fact that the compressor on the Mercedes turbocharger is at the opposite end of the engine to the turbine. Could that be it?

There have also been suggestions that Mercedes hit the ground running because it has invested heavily in a state-of-the-art, full-car rig set-up at its Brackley base.

It was this that allowed it to be operating its engine, car installation and gearbox as one in the factory before running on track, to avoid the kind of early troubles that wrecked Red Bull's early testing. Perhaps it's that?

Rival teams have even suggested that Mercedes has simply upped its spending to a huge degree and has bought its way to success. Surely it's not as simple as that?

Others have also mentioned the role that its fuel partner Petronas has played in creating some impressive new technology - like oil that gets thicker as its gets hotter - has proved a game changer. Really?

Mercedes has been doing a lot of celebrating in 2014 already © LAT

Yet while some innovation, equipment, finances and technology may all be contributing to Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg being in a class of their own at the moment, none of these can be singled out.

In fact, if you want to trace the Mercedes success story back to a single factor, then it's something that you'll not find on the car at all.

And best of all for Mercedes, it's not something that can be copied by its rivals.

For the roots of Mercedes' advantage lead all the way back to 2008 - when a decision made by the firm's engine division then paved the way for what is happening right now.

Back then, F1 was bracing itself for the arrival of Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems (KERS) in 2009. And Mercedes, which was then locked in a close partnership with McLaren, elected to keep development of its KERS in-house rather than allow the Woking-based team to head off and do its own thing.

And, more importantly than that, when it was agreed by teams that no one would run KERS in 2010, Mercedes didn't wash its hands of the project and let all that knowledge go to waste.

As engine chief Andy Cowell told me earlier this year: "When KERS wasn't raced in 2010, we didn't disband. We said: 'right, we will do a second generation KERS.'

Decisions Mercedes made while powering Hamilton to his first title could take him to a second © LAT

"We raced that with six cars in 2011 and that has built a really good platform of internal knowledge, capability and capacity. We've built on that really."

It was an approach that was in contrast to its current engine rivals - who either let teams develop KERS themselves (Renault) or relied upon external partners like Magneti Marelli (Ferrari).

Mercedes' determination to stick with its in-house project has not only given it a massive head start in terms of gathering experience with energy-recovery systems. It's also given it a benefit in ensuring that those systems are completely integrated with the engine. Everything is as one.

With the early 2014 races showing that the key to success is in energy recovery and deployment over a lap, rather than all-out fuel efficiency or power from the turbo engine, having an advantage in this area is massively important.

It's the integration of its energy recovery systems, power unit and car that is the real story behind Mercedes' dominance.

It was just better prepared over a longer period than its rivals for the challenge of the new regulations.

Time will tell if its advantage can be eroded; and Ferrari and Renault are well aware of what needs to be done. The gap will close in time - that's the inevitability of F1.

But for now, decisions made long ago in the board room of a factory building in Brixworth are the real reason why Hamilton and Rosberg have the advantage on track today.

It shows that in F1, success can never just be measured in thousandths of a second. Sometimes it takes years.