F1 Mercedes

Back in mid June the squadron enjoyed a very well attended visit to the Mercedes AMG Formula-One headquarters at Brackley hosted by RAS member and Mercedes employee, James Allison.

The factory is a stone’s throw from Turweston and it is a shame that the rather miserable start to our summer prevented many of the previously planned arrivals taking place by air. Several hardy souls did make it in, with our Commodore perhaps enjoying the most intrepid arrival of the bunch in his Stearman following a weather enforced diversion to Old Warden en-route. Happily, those unable to make it by air joined the visit by car, allowing a full complement to tuck into the buffet lunch in the factory prior to the tour kicking off.

The group were shown first into the simulator hall – a facility that is not normally shown to outsiders and very different in layout to the sort of hexapods we are used to seeing for aircraft training. We learned that simulators in F1 are not for procedural training of the drivers, but are an integral part of the performance design process, allowing the engineers to create faster cars. As such they need to be able to actuate with the same violence as the cars themselves – and so F1 simulators are an entirely bespoke design.
After that we split into three groups and were whisked around the design and production facilities of the team. This covered the composites area where carbon fibre cloth is turned into the designs we watch on the television as well as the high-tech machine shop and the test rigs used to prove out designs before they venture on to the track. We were shown the race support room – a sort of Mission Control room that allows the factory based engineers to support the race team no matter where they are in the world – and we were taken into the vast design floor where hundreds of desks house the engineers who create the F1 cars on their screens.

It was a very interesting tour and our members were left with strong impressions of absolute cleanliness, precision and attention to detail across a huge range of engineering disciplines. Very few of us had any idea prior to this visit just how large the industrial effort is to create and develop the racing cars we watch on our TVs.

Our happy three hours in the factory were accompanied by an improving weather picture, allowing all those who had flown in to enjoy a nice flight home to cap off a good day.