The one area Mercedes is losing

Mercedes may be set to maintain its perfect championship record in Formula 1's turbo-hybrid era, but, as the championship bursts back into life this weekend, the fact it is not favourite to win at Spa offers a fascinating insight into how nothing ever stands still in F1's competitive landscape.

Ferrari's gains on the power front have been noticeable in recent years and have left it heading to Belgium, and its home race in Italy next week, widely acknowledged as the team to beat in those events - despite its winless season so far.

This situation is a far cry from a few years ago when Mercedes was in a league of its own at 'power tracks'. In fact, the sands have firmly shifted in terms of where its car now excels.

Where once the engine was the root of its success, now Mercedes has created a chassis that many believe is the best on the grid. Ferrari has the best engine but is playing catch-up on the car front.

Mercedes has shown time and again this year that power is not everything, but do not think for a second that it is readily accepts the current situation.

One of the strengths at Mercedes' Brackley factory has been never dropping its desire to improve, and this also rings true at its engine facility at Brixworth.

As Andy Cowell, the managing director of Mercedes' HPP engine division, says about his firm no longer being viewed as the class leader in engine performance: "Being beaten at any of the vital statistics is a kick in the nuts!

"HPP is full of people that are hugely competitive, and they hate it. But that does drive you on. It is the same if one of our bits breaks, or a test doesn't go well in the factory. The world doesn't see that, but we are disappointed in the same way.

"To be successful you have to be tenacious. You have to care. So, when it goes wrong or when you are not the best, it hurts and you care about it. But, typically, if you are successful in competition, you do have that tenacity to brush that off and use that energy to drive you forwards. And that is what we are working on.

"Ferrari are a well-funded and determined organisation that are always: 'Come on, how do we win? How we do we win a championship? How do we stop them?' Sometimes they are desperate to win and they put a lot of resource into it. But we are desperate to hang onto our position too, which makes a great competition."

"You just keep going around each little piece of detail. We are in the middle of next year's engine, and you just go back to first principles - asking what has to be there from the regulations perspective" Andy Cowell

The impression is very much that rather than getting stressed about having lost an obvious advantage, Mercedes has turned it into a reason to feel motivated to improve.

But Cowell is honest enough to admit that Mercedes has been burned in the past by believing it had got the job done.

"In 2014, we were dominant in terms of performance but vulnerable from a reliability perspective," he reflects. "The last test before the first race, on the last day or the last day and a half, we blew up about four engines - and none of them were at the life that we were hoping to achieve. So, we went to Melbourne thinking about how many races we could do.

"Our whole focus in 2014 was on reliability and 'how do we get this thing to last?' I think the success in '14 and '15 made us a bit complacent for '16, because in '16 we had some early-life high profile failures and that gave us one of those gut-wrenching wake-up calls.

"So we changed our standards with regards to what you accept as a permanent fix and what is OK - to be sure you have closed an issue out and move on, and what is not.

"You cannot rely on tick boxes and cross checks. It needs to be a robust design, manufacturing process and assembly because with three engines [allowed per car per season], each one is really precious. And if you get one of them wrong, you are going to cost that particular driver a championship if you are not careful. In 2016 there was a big shake on that."

Finding engine gains these days is not easy, with ever diminishing returns as the manufacturers approach the peak of what is possible with the current power units.

But Cowell says that blue sky thinking and the arrival of some fresh faces are the key pillars with which Mercedes will target the improvements it needs to make to stay competitive.

"It is incredibly hard," he admits. "We were big supporters of not changing the rules back to normally-aspirated engines, and we are big supporters of not changing the rules because of cost and the risk of performance not converging.

"That means you just keep going around each little piece of detail. We are in the middle of next year's engine, and you just go back to first principles - asking what has to be there from the regulations perspective.

"It's 'come on then guys: clean sheet of paper. Let's use the previous six engines as a learning and knowledge bank, but it doesn't mean we have to do it like that'.

"We are questioning: Is the turbo in the right place? Is the turbo spinning in the right direction? Have we got the right number of scavenge pumps? Should we have more? Should we have less? What are the pros? What are the cons?

"We look at heat rejection too, because there is a huge aerodynamic aspect to heat rejection. If there are 100 units of fuel energy going in, how do we get 55 good units rather than 50 units? Where are the bad units going? That, for all the engineers, is a particularly enjoyable quest."

"Every new person in a role, they spend six months getting their arms around it and then six months making it better than before" Andy Cowell

The turbo-hybrid engine concept has been around for many years now, so it could be expected that the quest for new ideas is pretty hard. But Cowell says this is where Mercedes' policy of nurturing new talent is paying off.

"We have got youngsters coming through the system at Brixworth," he says. "We have always been big fans of apprentices coming in, in terms of graduates, so there are some people that have recently been promoted into team leader position - so next year's power unit is their first power unit as a team leader.

"And there are some new department heads where next year's power unit is their first year as a department head - so they have got the excitement of it being their first engine, even though it is the seventh of the regulations.

"That rotation of people, and giving people new opportunities, gives us new ways of thinking. And they always want to do better than the previous person. That is sort of humanity's desire for ingenuity and continuous improvement; to always want to do better and learn. Every new person in a role, they spend six months getting their arms around it and then six months making it better than before."

With F1's engine regulations set for some tweaking in 2021 - although perhaps not as much as originally anticipated - next year's power unit could well be the last of the current rules cycle.

But while that will be year seven of essentially the same rules, Cowell thinks there are still gains to come - both in terms of power and the engine doing more for overall car performance.

"Every year there is 1-2% improvement to be had," he says. "There is a huge amount that can be done to make it easier on the car - in terms of mass, positioning, volume, heat rejections, operating temperatures, driveability etc.

"It means the engineers working on the chassis can just focus on that, and don't have to fuss about the noisy lump in the back and that it always does what the drivers want!"