Why the Mercedes F1 team is involved in yacht racing

The Mercedes Formula 1 team has teamed up with British sailor Ben Ainslie to win the America’s Cup for Britain’s Royal Yacht Squadron.

The America’s Cup is the oldest international trophy in the sport, 45 years older than the Olympics, but has not been won by a British team since it was first held as a race for the Isle of Wight in 1851. The Ineos Britannia team, led by Ainslie, hopes to change that by working closely with the UK Mercedes team to build a yacht capable of serving its current owners, Emirates Team New Zealand defeat.

The connection between the two teams is through Ineos, who owns a third of the F1 team and is the main supporter of Ineos Britannia. The sailing team will be based at the Mercedes headquarters in Brackley and rely on the technical resources of various departments through the Mercedes Applied Science department of the F1 team.

Mercedes expects up to 50 people to work on the yacht’s early design process when the rules, date and location for the 37th America’s Cup are agreed between New Zealand and Great Britain in mid-November. The technical lead of the yacht project will become Mercedes technical lead James Allison, who recently stepped down from the company’s F1 side.

Ineos

Shouldn’t Mercedes concentrate on Formula 1, not on yachts?

While the project has an obvious commercial connection through Ineos, Mercedes is also interested in shaping the project for the benefit of the F1 team’s engineers. The America’s Cup is often referred to as “F1 on the water” and there are clear links between the hydrodynamics that enable a racing yacht to “fly” on its foils in the ocean and the aerodynamics that an F1 car has keeps on the line.

Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff says, however, that the joint project will offer more than just a new source of income for the team through Mercedes Applied Science.

“We had situations in which engineers said we had been doing this for seven years – and many were even longer – with seven world championships and they asked where the next challenge was,” said Wolff. “And it doesn’t go beyond the challenge of winning the America’s Cup as a Challenger of Record.

“You are the underdog, so you have to do an even better job. This is an advantage because we keep the skills in-house and they don’t go elsewhere – within the industry or outside departments have said this is a nice challenge that they want to take on for the next three or five years and gain an understanding that can probably be used again in Formula 1.

“It’s almost like an activity that is so competitive that it takes all of your cognitive and intellectual focus. That becomes an asset when you look back on Formula One and get you out of your comfort zone.”

The Mercedes F1 car has been the benchmark since 2014. Clive Mason – Formula 1 / Formula 1 via Getty Images

One of the reasons the Mercedes team can afford to invest substantial funds in the America’s Cup campaign is because of Formula 1’s new budget cap this year. The introduction of a spending cap of $ 145 million in 2021 forced the team to make cuts in the design and engineering departments, but moving people to a non-F1 project outside of the cap allowed them to continue working for the team.

“From a cost cap perspective, this team was bigger last year than you could afford this year with a cost cap, and that means some of our resources are able to work on this type of project,” said Allison . “As the rhythm of the Cup campaign requires, it will hopefully be well dovetailed with the corresponding requirements in F1 country so that all the skills we have here can come into play.”

Mercedes Applied Science is also working on other projects, including the design and optimization of racing bikes, running shoes and Ineos’ SUV, the Grenadier. Wolff said the decision to diversify the business away from Formula 1 was due to the success of sports franchises in the United States.

“We looked at this pretty early because I’m always interested in learning from other sports leagues, and when you look across the ocean to the most developed American sports leagues – the NBA and the NFL – these guys have in real estate and in the hospitality business simply by having a stadium, “said Wolff.” And I think the next logical step for us is to diversify into technology. We have created all these IPs that we have never done before on any other Vehicle used as a racing car.

“We have never monetized the intellectual property that exists here, and you speak of billions spent on technology in a Formula 1 team.

“But Mercedes Applied Science is not a commercial engineering company. We don’t actively apply for engineering jobs, we want to work with people who want to break records or win championships on land, water, in the air and in space. We have seen the most demanding of all racing sports, the peak comparable to Formula 1, and not in the pursuit of margin, but rather in the pursuit of learning and diversification for the benefit of Formula 1.

“Also a great new project for engineers who have learned their laurels in Formula 1 but want to see something different. However, it has to stand economically on its own two feet.

“It’s our way of diversifying into other businesses, but we have to make sure that we are a contributing partner with the same ambition that we have in Formula 1 but without distracting from both activities: they have to run in parallel.

“We don’t want to read the headline in three years time that we haven’t won on the road since we started sailing. That mustn’t happen.”

INEOS founder Jim Ratcliffe and Mercedes CEO Toto Wolff at the start of their partnership in early 2020. Bryn Lennon / Getty Images

How will Mercedes F1 technology make a yacht faster?

While Allison takes over the technical management of the America’s Cup campaign from Ineos Britannia, the German marine designer Martin Fischer will lead the design concept. As tempting as it is to imagine shapes from Lewis Hamilton’s F1 car on a racing yacht, the reality is that Mercedes’ engineering expertise is more likely to add parts of the boat that you can’t see.

“Areas that are more difficult for America’s Cup teams to tackle but are the food and drink of an F1 team are all systems we have to know, for example, that when you have a hydraulic line over a certain length of something, how far to keep it away from all the other things so it doesn’t get annoyed on the whistle and how often in the whistle to prop it up so it doesn’t bounce around so much and the kind of gear we need to have Inspecting things so we know what we designed is what we built and assembled, “said Allison.

“All design standards that were painstakingly learned in a Formula 1 team and written into a procedure can now be taken up and used by the Britannia engineering community. Something like that is quite valuable.

“If you want all of your good hydrodynamic and aerodynamic ideas to come true – that is, the things that come from the marine people on the team, backed by the competent bodies that work with them – then the boat needs to be assembled on time and to the right ones Qualities, it mustn’t collapse on the water for the sailors to learn while sailing, so I think the maturity of the Mercedes Formula 1 team provides a really functional environment for the designers to then create designs that should be reliable and function.

“Hopefully then we’ll build enough raw power into the boat to make it a competitive and reliable boat.”

Allison added, “We hope we understand correctly that being good at racing doesn’t mean being good at yacht building. We want to learn from people who are good at yacht building how we can best help.

“So my opening talks with Martin consisted of assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the previous campaign on Ben’s team, the strengths and weaknesses of the campaign that Martin was involved in with Luna Rossa [the runner up at the 36th America’s Cup]to find out how we can reinforce the strengths and mitigate the weaknesses.

“And seeing where there are opportunities, like the technical standards that we have, is something any engineering group is happy to take up and fall like a manna from simply saying this is work we don’t do have to, right? just use that?

“To specifically try to get the likely key attributes because we don’t yet know the location or the timing, but what are the likely key attributes and what kind of force are we going to need.”