Top Gear’s coolest racing cars: Mercedes-AMG F1 W05

Bernie Ecclestone is no fan of the hybrid turbo formula, but like it or not, dominance in F1 has always flowed from mastery of a new technical framework as much as it has the performance of superstar drivers. On which basis, Mercedes is smack bang in the middle of the purplest patch since the late, great Prince mislaid his umbrella in the mid-’80s and made a film about it.

Depending on how you choose to interpret statistics, 2014’s F1 W05 Hybrid is arguably the most successful racing car ever. It scored 16 wins from 19 races, versus the McLaren MP4/4’s 15 victories from 16 in 1988, or Ferrari’s F2002 which won 14 of the 15 races it competed in during 2002, in the midst of Michael Schumacher’s imperial phase. (Go back to modern F1’s first season, 1950, and the Alfa Romeo 158/159 won six out of seven races – what a corker that car was.)

The W05 also made pole 18 times, locked out the front row 11 times, and had the same number of one-two finishes. Such a performance in the frenzied cauldron of contemporary F1 is a mind-blowing achievement. In fact, so thoroughly has Mercedes conquered the complexities of the turbo hybrid era that even now, what feels like hundreds of races later, its key rivals are still scratching around for a solution. OK, we’d understand if you disputed the glory of all this as a silver car wins yet another Grand Prix and you sink deeper into fridge-to-sofa-and-back-again Sunday afternoon somnambulism, but the fact is, Lewis Hamilton is closing in on ‘greatest British driver’-ever status, and it’s Mercedes that has given him the tools to do it.

It’s rare to have the opportunity, but TG.com was present at key stages during the development and debut of the W05. Mercedes’ High Performance Powertrain division, tucked away near the village of Brixworth in Northamptonshire, is where the power unit magic happens, and there could be no better tour guide than engineering director Andy Cowell. “There are six departments here,” he told me, back when the 1.6-litre turbo V6 was transitioning from drawing board to test bench, “and our aim is simple: what can we do to make a racing car go round a circuit faster? There’s a performance engineering division, an electronics one, we have guys who develop new concepts then bring them to life, a reliability group that determines if the product is good enough to leave the factory… engineers are an unruly bunch who never really want to commit to something when they can keep on being creative. So there’s a management group here too, whose job it is to get them to commit.”

Cowell showed us a supercomputer, overseen by 20 experts running constant simulations, measuring the variables and optimising the engine’s envelope depending on the circuit. They are tested to the point of destruction; they were simulating Spa on the day of our visit. As the exhausts glowed red and then white hot, I urged the guys to push the unit until it lunched itself (haven’t you always wondered what it must feel like when an F1 engine detonates three inches behind your head?) but they looked at me, quite correctly, like I was an idiot.

“We’re not actually frightened of failure,” Cowell admitted, “not in the factory, anyway. We have lots of them here, in various ways, and we learn from them. That’s one of the things we do. On the track, we then operate within that.” Should the worst occur, there’s a Tuesday morning “fault meeting”, so there’s nowhere to hide. “It’s very aggressive,” Cowell said. “There are maybe 15 of us sitting in a room. You can’t sit there and say, “oh, it’s a one-off, it won’t happen again”. It’s self-policing, and can be very uncomfortable.”

F1 began using KERS (Kinetic Energy Regeneration System) in 2008, a technology originally supplied and honed by Mercedes. There’s little doubt that getting their cumulative brainpower around this early manifestation of hybrid tech helped as the W05 came together. Consider that the KERS hardware weighed 107kg and achieved an energy efficiency of 39 per cent in 2009, it was 25.3kg and 70 per cent two years later, and by 2012 it weighed 24kg and was achieving 80 per cent efficiency.

As a mahoosive car manufacturer, all involved are also passionate about the crossover between F1 and your new A180. As you might expect… Like Bernie, we wish the damn things sounded better, and no one’s going to fall in love with fuel flow meters, but winning a GP at the same pace as before while using 35 per cent less fuel is no mean feat.

“It's quite an honourable thing to work on as an engineer – we’re trying to create a perpetual motion machine, where everything is that bit more efficient,” Cowell told me several years later, at the pre-season test in Jerez. “But the biggest area of opportunity is still the internal combustion engine.”

Thank goodness for that. The W05’s power unit (which comprised six different systems – the 1.6-litre V6 internal combustion unit, the turbo, a motor generator unit for kinetic energy (MGU-K), another for heat (MGU-H), an energy store, and a control box that oversees all the electronics) was also ingeniously packaged. The compressor and turbo, we soon learned, sat at opposite ends of the ICE, one of those holy F1 technical advances were everything cascaded virtuously – packaging, efficiency, dynamics.

“The past few years has been about figuring out how to make the engine assist the aerodynamics,” Mercedes F1’s technical executive director Paddy Lowe added. "It’s been great coming back to something where the engine plays its proper part. We are often asked the question of whether there is actually any technology transfer between race and road car engineering. The answer is resoundingly ‘yes’ – but it’s a more subtle process than bolting bits from one car onto another.

“There are examples of direct transfer – for instance the Nanoslide technology used to coat cylinder bore surfaces. And then there is indirect transfer, where F1 serves as a research laboratory for developing new solutions and showing the world what is possible.”

At the 2014 Jerez test, TG.com watched as Kimi Raikkonen’s Ferrari puttered to a halt after half a lap (he returned to the garage in a Seat Toledo mini-cab), and McLaren could only dream of what it must have been like to manage a half-lap putter. The writing on the wall was visible from outer space.

“The fastest racing car needs an outstanding driver, great vehicle dynamics, great aerodynamics, and a lot of grunt that’s always there,” Andy Cowell told me, as modest as ever but fairly sure he was in for a good year. “And that means lots of specialist teams pulling together, to look after one car. Then it’s down to tactics, and reacting to events. I don't think it’s down to an individual area."

“Every reveal, it’s nerve-wracking. Have I missed a trick? Some interpretation, some idea… I hate playing catch-up on any innovation in this sport,” Paddy Lowe added. He needn’t have worried.

“F1 is about innovation,” Toto Wolff told me much more recently. “I know there are many fans who think we should put GP2 cars on the grid, call it F1, and put the best drivers in them and let them fight it out. I believe in F1 as the pinnacle of the innovation, with the highest performance, and the most complicated cars.”