Mercedes GP 2012 Radical ‘New’ Nose

Today at Jerez, the first day of testing for the 2012 F1 Season, Mercedes GP revealed it’s new ‘nose’ (see exclusive photo below). Ross Brawn said it had significant aerodynamic advantages and that air would literally ‘pass over like water off a duck’s back’. Rosberg was first to drive it and Schumacher is looking forward to testing it shortly. An unnamed source in the pitlane said this was a stupid idea and that Mercedes engineers were clearly quacking up.

I don’t know if it is quick, but it sure looks cute to me.

2012 F1 Testing Begins!

by Jake McMillan

Hoorah, with the 2012 Formula 1 testing beginning at Jerez tomorrow we will finally get a little bit of F1 action! However, as I have warned before, we all need to be very careful about over-analysing the relative performance of the teams. Testing is exactly what it says with teams testing and fine-tuning the performance of the cars. Some things will work and some won’t.

Unless one team is significantly much faster throughout a test session, or is significantly off the pace, we will not know which team is really quickest until we get to Melbourne next month. Despite knowing this, we all get sucked in every year, trying to guess which team will be the fastest. This is okay as long as we  remember that it is just a guess:

• Teams will be running different fuel loads from each other

• Teams seeking sponsorship will inevitably want to appear quick by doing more low fuel runs

• The cars will be developed further between the tests and the first race so until we get to Melbourne we really don’t know

• All teams ‘sandbag’ to varying degrees