Why Mercedes faces F1 'jeopardy'

A wintry mist hangs heavy as dawn breaks over one of Oxfordshire's many former Royal Air Force bases.

The first rays of sunlight unveil objects previously hidden in the gloom; a disused runway and hangars that once housed some of the most advanced fighter aircraft of their time. Inside a warehouse on the site of what was RAF Bicester are some of the greatest engineering creations of the past few years: they have wings, but they were not built for the skies.

This sleepy corner of Oxfordshire is now a retirement home for racing cars. The last five title-winning Mercedes Formula 1 cars, along with earlier incarnations, sit eerily still and silent here, the very opposite of what they were designed to do. And while James Allison has spent much of his recent career wearing rosso corsa - the colours of the opposition - today he is clad in white and standing between the two championship machines he has overseen from a technical perspective.

He concedes that he feels very little emotion for the redundant entities around him, his mental energy now being entirely directed at the current challenge taking place ten miles north of here at Mercedes F1 HQ in Brackley.

He also points out that while he is the team's de facto technical leader, being photographed on his own fails to adequately acknowledge the toils of the thousand craftspeople who put two silver racing cars out on the track every year.

It's in Brackley where those same craftspeople are currently applying the finishing touches to the 2019 car.

The immediate concern is whether enough performance has been clawed back after the FIA mandated a change in the regulations to cut downforce in a bid to improve overtaking. As Mercedes aim to win a sixth consecutive world championship, they are anxious about how they'll stack up against the opposition.

Testing has provided some early clues, but it's not until everyone has arrived for the season opener in Australia that the competitive order will truly become apparent. And Allison is as wary about form as he is about the success of the new rules.

"This is a new year, so we go in with very little true expectation of being at the front," he notes. "We hope we've done enough, but there are no guarantees. Although the recovery in performance has felt steep, we don't yet know whether it will be steep enough.

"I'd say 2019 presents quite a chunky regulation change. Look at the detail on the front wing of last year's car," he adds, pointing to the left edge of Hamilton's title-winning W09. "That's not there for a laugh. Those tiny wings set the conditions for where the low-energy wake of the tyre goes. If that crappy air gets too involved in the rest of the car, it doesn't produce enough downforce. So you have to re-invent the front wing, plus the brake duct and barge board and, together, this threesome creates this favourable behaviour.

"We've been pretty good at getting this right over the past few years and so in terms of the new regulations, the better your aero concept, the bigger the hit. Getting the 2019 car back up the performance slope has been exhilarating for the aerodynamicists, who are used to fractional gains and are suddenly finding big chunks, but there is no knowledge of how big the hit has been for our competitors. This feels like a year laden with excitement and opportunity - but jeopardy too. The emotions are heightened on this occasion by the regulation change."

As a precursor to a wider series of technical changes for 2021 that will aim to improve the spectacle of F1, the teams agreed to a moderate revamp for 2019.

Although the degree of change might sound minor, it affects key areas that, as Allison explained, interact with each other to produce a sizeable effect on the car's overall performance. Whether this will deliver the desired outcome of cars being able to follow one another more closely remains to be seen.

"My guess is that it will have little impact," says Allison, "but I hope that's not the case, as we want exciting, wheel-to-wheel racing. That's only speculation, though, because even a team as big as ours has limited resource and we've spent that getting the car to go as quickly as possible. You wouldn't use your limited aerodynamic resource on academic experiments to find out if following another car was better than it used to be."

It's appropriate that we're discussing aerodynamics in a workshop on a disused air force base, since Allison's father is Air Chief Marshal Sir John Allison, and James himself is an accomplished stunt pilot in his spare time. RAF Bicester has been saved from dereliction and converted into a hub for automotive history, not just focusing on the past decade of the Mercedes AMG F1 team. Thirty companies are separately housed in what's now known as Bicester Heritage, which specialises in storing classic motors.

Among the silver arrows paraphernalia on display in this building, there are two damaged sidepods hanging on the wall: the battle-scarred pieces of carbon fibre are a reminder that even for a successful and well-drilled organisation things can go wrong, very quickly. They are a legacy of that famous first-lap collision between Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton at the 2016 Spanish Grand Prix.

That was the season Allison left Ferrari - his second stint at Maranello after an interregnum with 'Team Enstone'. After serving his gardening leave, he replaced Williams-bound Paddy Lowe at Mercedes.

Since then, Allison's technical creativity has been allowed to flourish, thanks to Toto Wolff's relaxed management style. It's a different environment to Ferrari, where, until recently, a stifling blame culture prevailed. So different are the regimes, that at Mercedes failure is considered to be a healthy aspect of progress.

"It's certainly something we have consciously set out to do," explains Allison. "We've tried to create an organisation where anyone can feel comfortable saying: 'I know what went wrong and I'll put it right next time.' It's impossible to make progress unless you are prepared to embrace failure.

"If you take two different parts of the organisation, an aerodynamicist and a sponsor procurer, you will find the statistics are similar. If you consider the amount of cold calls and follow-up interviews a commercial person will take compared with the actual amount of sponsors they get, it will be only two to three per cent that reach a conclusion. They have to deal with a vast river of failure for every glorious success.

"An aerodynamicist has almost the same thing. They are trying to improve something that is already amazingly brilliant and has had 'man millennia' of effort poured into it. Only a tiny percentage of their ideas work out, but you learn from those failures and you need to embrace them because they give you the clue for where the success is.

"If we have a system for operating that is screwed up, we have to say it's not working and make it better. Feeling safe to say 'That's my area, I'll fix it,' is a really important part of improving quickly.

"It's also necessary to have the bravery to take a certain amount of calibrated risk to innovate with new ideas. If someone feels their head is going to be swiped off because of a risk we all decided to take, then they'll keep their heads below the parapet."

Technical innovation has not only given Mercedes a solid foundation for their championship-winning creations, but also enabled them to reassert themselves when their rivals caught up.

When it looked as though Ferrari were gaining the upper hand at times 
last season, Mercedes' competitive urge produced truly pioneering solutions, such as the rear-wheel spacers that proved so controversial. That, in tandem with Hamilton's brilliant driving, brought them back into contention.

"Spa was a tough experience because we were beaten by a quicker car," admits Allison. "And if that was a bellwether for the remaining races, it was going to be pretty desperate.

"But one of the many things that makes me proud to be a part of this team is that despite the body blow, from Toto leading at the front, down to the someone who has just joined us from university, no one had anything else in their mind but putting it right. This team has got a brilliant spirit."

Absolutely crucial to the uplift in performance was Hamilton himself, who barely put a wheel out of place and raised his game to arguably the highest it has been in his career.

The question is whether he can sustain that momentum, transforming it into yet another fruitful title challenge. Allison admits that, over the winter months, Mercedes did a data-crunching analysis to find out if they were lucky or good in 2018. And how much of that 'good' was simply Lewis.

"We were more good than lucky because, on balance, our car was the strongest throughout the whole season," says Allison, "but boy-oh-boy, did Lewis make a difference. He was remarkable. I think all Lewis observers would pick out 2018 as the most complete season that he has put together. And arguably, look at any performance by any racing driver and it would be right up there. It's remarkable that any champion in top-level international sport can keep digging as deep as they do, to produce the results they do.

"Ignore the driving bit for a moment. Think of the punishing schedule to get himself fit and at the right weight and travel several times around the world. Then to have his entire professional life lived under the closest scrutiny, where we can even see every single twitch of his body recorded on sensors. There is no hiding mistakes from us, even if they aren't visible to the outside world. The degree of exposure and the pressure they operate under - I wouldn't wish it on anyone.

"Drivers who produce performances year in, year out, show how hungry they are. That hunger propels them to a greatness that the rest of us can only look upon and marvel at."

Working with Hamilton for past two seasons has given Allison a deeper insight into the five-time champion's methodical approach and how Lewis establishes what Allison describes as the 'lie of the land' before building to a focused effort as he closes in on his target.

It's like watching a predatory animal identifying and then stalking its prey before making the move for the kill.

"At the beginning of the year I think he is 'feeling out' our strengths, the opposition's strengths and our respective weaknesses, but he hasn't really got his enemy in his crosshairs," says Allison.

"Then as the first few races unfold and the pressure of the championship ramps up he gets stronger and stronger.

"In contrast Sebastian Vettel comes out of the blocks raining punches and is really impressive, but with Lewis, he finishes strong. It's not the first time we've seen from mid-season onwards someone who moves to a different plane from all the others."

From both a technical and racing perspective, Australia can't come soon enough. The opening grand prix of the year will supply more early clues about form, but if the season just gone offers any indication of what is to come, then this will be another championship where the relative performances of the key protagonists will ebb and flow across the 21-race season.

In 11 months from now, the contents of this hall will be shuffled around to accommodate a newcomer, and the W10 will take up retirement here in Bicester. It will have to be another razor-sharp silver arrow if it is to live up to the illustrious company it will keep here.