Hamilton and Rosberg complete first runs in new Mercedes W07

2016 F1 season

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The Mercedes W07 has run for the first time in the hands of both its drivers.

Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg gave the team’s new car its traditional pre-testing shakedown run at Silverstone. The W07 chassis powered by Mercedes’ new PU106C power unit covered 98.2 kilometres.

Rosberg also narrated an onboard video which was released by the team (above).

Hamilton will be first to drive the car during next week’s four-day test. He will also drive the car on Wednesday, while Rosberg will be at the wheel on Tuesday and Thursday. “This driver allocation is the reverse of that used during today’s promotional event at Silverstone and at the opening test of 2015,” Mercedes noted.

Mercedes intends to issue the first official photographs of its car on Sunday before presenting it to the media at 8:15am local time at the Circuit de Catalunya on Monday morning. Mercedes will also distribute “exclusive content ahead of the launch” on its Twitter account tomorrow.

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Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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29 comments on “Hamilton and Rosberg complete first runs in new Mercedes W07”

  1. Looks blacker, at least what I can see from the first video. Otherwise it looks extremely similar to last year’s car, which was expected, why change a winning formula? I guess the innovations are really inside of the car.

  2. Awesome stuff from Mercedes to put that video out so quickly.

  3. A great treat for the fans there – finally, a near perfect cockpit camera! The snug, comfy looking interior only makes my urge to drive an F1 greater!

    1. Yes indeed haha!

      Sounding quite sharp too.

    2. Indeed, finally!
      But knowing F1, getting this in races will likely take years unfortunately.

      1. In fairness to FOM and co, there’s a significant difference between sticking a GoPro to a helmet (I’m guessing they did something along those lines) and a transmitting camera that can record and broadcast for a 2 hour race.
        With that said I’d love this to become a thing, as you get a feeling for what the driver is doing and seeing at all times

        1. As this is F1, the pinnacle of technology, it shouldn’t be a problem. But as we’ve seen, it was behind even with basic stuff like implementing HD TV.

        2. This has been done for years in the US, there is even better camera views with camera’s placed inside the visors in IndyCar, the footage is absolutely incredible. Why F1 hasn’t done it yet is mind boggling.

          Fast forward to about 1 minute in:

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6G9VJ_UNKWQ

          1. That was just a shot used by pagenaut in practice, he regularly attaches go pro cameras to his helmet during practice but you never see these angles used during the races.
            indycar have not placed a live camera inside or even on a helmet for something like 10 years.

            fom on the other hand had a helmet mounted camera on will stevens at monaco last year.
            http://i.imgur.com/s1Xd8pn.jpg

          2. “he regularly attaches go pro cameras to his helmet during practice but you never see these angles used during the races.”

            This camera isn’t a go pro, it’s placed inside the visor (as you can see at the start of the video), Go Pros arn’t that small to be able to do that. But as i said, they’ve had these eye-level visor cams for over a decade, it’s not new.

            This is race footage from Champ Car 13 years ago (long before go pro was around)

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOUJS3F-5XY

      2. @balue @bigwilk FOM have used cameras like this fairly recently.

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3I8ZxbiT4Y
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZrmgeNXTR4
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eh5gLAWl8QI
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9A4vNwzEJ8

        One of the main reason’s you don’t see FOM use that camera more often (The last was at Monaco last year on a Manor during Thursday practice) is that they have to get the permission of the team & driver to mount a camera on a helmet & its something that teams dislike as it disrupts airflow into the air-intake & it also add’s a bit of extra cabling to the helmet which the drivers don’t like.

        Also its one thing mounting a camera on a drivers visor for a few test laps, But during a race weekend you have things like tear-off’s to consider & you can’t mount a camera their as it will disrupt the drivers vision (Hence why the FOM mounted cameras are always towards the top, well away from the visor).

        Modern helmet design & safety regulations also prevent the sort of cameras placed inside the helmet that you used to see in the states (And which we also experimented with). The unit used in Indycar required some of the foam padding be removed to place the camera & also run the wire down the back of the padding which in later test’s was found to have compromised the effectiveness of the padding. Nascar also banned that particular camera in 2004 as the extra cabling was interfering with driver extraction in certain situations (Mainly if they were trapped in the car upside down).

        Indycar played around with Google Glass a few years ago but ultimately never adopted it for use on a broadcast (Even though it is capable of live transmission via a cell network):
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPwDoppJs2E
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZebWF40DKI

        1. GT Racer (@gt-racer)

          Good post. Must have missed those shots in the races. Hopefully the tech issues can be sorted and we get the eye-level view camera angles more often.

  4. That merc sounds beautiful when you listen to it from the cockpit like in that video!
    It might be too early to tell, but it sounds more like the Honda engine than last years merc…

    FOM should put all the mics for the tv onboard audio in the cockpit

    1. FOM should put all the mics for the tv onboard audio in the cockpit

      We tried that once & the audio volume was no different to the usual position but we did suffer problems with wind noise & other rattling sounds caused by things like the driver/seat moving under load.

      In the late 90s we put a lot of work into audio both trackside & in-car & it was a result of that testing that it was discovered that the best audio for the in-car setup came from placing the mic within the side-pod as it was close enough to the engine/exhaust to pick up the audio & was also shielded from the wind noise that caused problems when the mic was placed in other locations (Which at times drowned out engine audio).

      From around 1999 onwards we worked with the teams to ensure the mic was placed where we got the best quality audio without been in the way of there components (Wiring, cooling etc..). The mic’s are usually strapped to the wiring harness, 1 in each side of the car about half way down the side-pod as close to engine/exhaust as they can get without the heat damaging it.

      That setup is now used by pretty much every other series (Indycar included) as they too found that setup to be the best in terms of volume/quality.

      1. Thanks for this explanation @gt-racer.

    2. Meanwhile, in a top secret McLaren Workshop, a crate is being unpacked with “New HONDA engine” and “For Fernando’s Eyes Only”, and when opened the engineers all stand back in awe. This is so unlike the previous Honda engine, it almost looks like a Mercedes engine. They start it up and it sounds different from last year’s Honda … but it has a vaguely familiar sound. Strangely, for a Honda engine, the brand name has been ground away, but faintly you can see it started with the a letter similar to “M”. Meanwhile, Fernando has been seen smiling.

  5. Those wishing for a better engine noise will be disappointed, I suppose.

    1. I’ve been disappointed with sounds since 2011. Nothing, and I mean, nothing on earth can ever bring back the sound of the double diffuser on a 2011 F1 engine.

  6. From the shots I’ve seen on the technical forums, this thing either has a MASSIVE roll hoop intake or a 360 camera rig..

    The sidepods look tiny though, so this leans to a larger roll hoop intake… Suppose they can loose a bit of rear wing performance if they have an ultra efficient floor combined with their trick (and probably illegal) suspension keeping the floor in its operating window throughout the lap.

    1. Having physically seen the roll hoop both in terms of the tooling last summer and in the carbon in December, I can say that the roll hoop is perfectly normal in size.
      It also tends usually not to really be for cooling but rather is the engine air intake. Could be wrong though!

      1. I actually personally unpacked a load of the tooling for the rear end of the chassis. Looked like it was the mound for laying up the carbon. Nothing remarkable about it, really.

      2. Looks like you were wrong.

        Honestly, you had the roll hoop intake in your hands and couldnt tell how significantly different it was from last years?

        The snorkel intakes do much more than feed the engine these days BTW.

        1. Looks like it, doesn’t it? I’m going to guess that what I saw was the rear of the chassis before those big side intakes were bonded on. Because the thing I saw had a 2016 part number on it. And it was muuuuuch smaller than the full intake. You can clearly see inside the intake that there are three separate chambers. Must be manufactured separately and bonded onto the crash structure.

  7. Something is weird around the mirror area, is it too high?

  8. Not very noisy though.

  9. What did surprise me was how useful the mirrors remain at high speed. I always thought those were almost useless at high speed because of the vibrations.

    And the shock that go through you with every upshift.

  10. That was a wonderful video of a drivers point of view of driving an f1 car i.e alot more physical than it appears on tv. It would be a brilliant view of drivers going wheel to wheel in a race

    1. Hans (@hanswesterbeek)
      19th February 2016, 20:40

      With these camera’s: spectacle ‘problem’ solved. Back to fixing the sport.

  11. I hope Ferrari can keep up with W07. F1 needs it.

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