AMG Formula One Race Team Reveals what it Takes to Create Winners
Exclusive Mercedes-Benz video gives an inside look at the AMG Petronas team’s recipe for checkered flag dominance.
Lewis Hamilton is not only a veteran in Formula One, but a five-time world champion. Valtteri Bottas is in his second year as Hamilton’s teammate after spending his first four Formula One seasons with Williams. Together, the duo are the face of Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport, racking up wins, poles and fastest laps around the world.
Behind their successes is the team’s engineering station. Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport pulls back the curtain on what all goes on in the center of the team’s garage during any given race.
“The clip focuses on race engineers Toto Wolff and Peter Bonnington as well Lewis and Valtteri’s crew. Bonnington introduces everyone at the station, from the performance engineer; tires and aero crew; to the engine mechanic watching over Hamilton and Bottas’s engines.
“As a team principal, the risk of distracting the operational guys is much bigger than actually adding some value,” said Wolff. “I felt that for my role, sitting back in the garage and having an overview of everything is more important.”
Aside from his view from the far end of the engineering station, Wolff also has a view of the cars on the track and the pit wall crew. Bonnington adds that the pit wall area used to be a noisy place with “the old V8 cars pounding around making a lot of noise,” prompting the team to obtain digital noise-cancelling headphones to deal with the chaos on the wall.
Both Bonnington and fellow race engineer Tony Ross say the station has a lot of information to sort through every lap, which puts them in a position of only presenting the most relevant to the team and drivers.
“Even when you come back from the summer shutdown,” said Ross, “because you’ve been away for two weeks, it’s like the first day of term again. Through a weekend, because it’s so kind of busy, you’ve got to remember again, ‘Ah, right, I should be doing this now. I should be doing that now.'”
Another bit of tech used in the garage is a wireless intercom system, which allows the team engineers to check out track conditions while the drivers stay in the garage away from the fans, all the better to devise the proper strategy to winning the race, something both Ross and Bonnington love about their jobs at Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport.
Join the MB World forums now!
