F1 2015 - Teams and Drivers - Who goes where?!

Haas F1 acquires Marussia factory

Gene Haas has acquired the former Marussia F1 facility in Banbury to use has the European base for his new Grand Prix team.
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Seems like a good and sensible move for Haas if it's true, this part could be good for them too...

It is thought that Haas has also acquired the data and designs for the 2015 Marussia.
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... I don't imagine the Marussia design will have been revolutionary but it is surely a good base to work from and they have a year to hopefully put something half decent together.
 
dannyjo22 said:
I think you need to check your history to see who was in the inferior car that year. :p
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over the whole year the Brawn was inferior simply because they had absolutely no money to invest in the car for over 6 months of the year (not to mention the fact the engine was mounted upside down to fit it in, so therefore getting inferior performance before they even started)
 
FrankJH said:
over the whole year the Brawn was inferior simply because they had absolutely no money to invest in the car for over 6 months of the year (not to mention the fact the engine was mounted upside down to fit it in, so therefore getting inferior performance before they even started)
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Wrong year :p They were talking about the Honda (BUT) vs the Renault (ALO) in 2004.
 
englishpremier said:
Unless the design is fundementally flawed. In which case it could be a curse.
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Yea definitely, hopefully they can pick up any potential issues like that.

Any useful info that can be gained would be a plus (depending on how much they paid for it I guess :p).

Haas seem to be going about everything the right way, I hope they manage to put together a decent effort and their future is good... An American team can only do good for F1 in the US and I'd rather see more expansion there than over in some of the countries as of recently.
 
FrankJH said:
over the whole year the Brawn was inferior simply because they had absolutely no money to invest in the car for over 6 months of the year (not to mention the fact the engine was mounted upside down to fit it in, so therefore getting inferior performance before they even started)
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As I've said in the past, I'm fairly certain you can't mount an F1 engine upside down. :rolleyes:
 
englishpremier said:
Unless the design is fundementally flawed. In which case it could be a curse.
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There's little to suggest they'll use the Marussia designs, but it will give them a known solid platform with which to compare their own ideas.

My main concern is why and how the split sites will work? Renault said in the early 2000s they found it difficult working across the channel, so how is it going to work with the small matter of the Atlantic in the middle? Unless one is going to be offices and the other factory (unlikely, given the additional facilities they're building in North Carolina), I can't see how it will do anything other than cause problems.
 
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I imagine th cas will be built in the US where the Autoclaves etc are, and the UK will be where the cars go back too during the season for strip down ad rebuild.

Also, Lol at an upside down engine :rolleyes:
 
FrankJH said:
(not to mention the fact the engine was mounted upside down to fit it in, so therefore getting inferior performance before they even started)
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this_is_gav said:
As I've said in the past, I'm fairly certain you can't mount an F1 engine upside down. :rolleyes:
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Heh, quite.

FrankJH - the packaging issue with the Brawn was getting the engine and (Brawn, not Merc) transmission to fit together. The crank height of the Mercedes engine was different to the Honda that they'd been expecting to fit. They ended up taking six inches off the back of the chassis. It was overweight with a too high centre of gravity and shouldn't really have worked as well as it did for as long as it did. If they'd had the money, I suspect we'd have seen a B-spec car turn up part of the way into the year that had the engine slotted in better and some of the more glaring faults ironed out.
 
I expect if it was designed for that engine originally and had the normal developments, it would have been more like the Merc advantage in 2014.
 
dannyjo22 said:
I think you need to check your history to see who was in the inferior car that year. :p
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Despite the engine being amongst the most powerful the car handled poorly and was unreliable. JB made his mark then in this car that all drivers were quoting was a dog and were amazed at how he was managing to drag the thing up to higher finishes than the car deserved.
 
What is less well known, though, is that the car is, in the words of my source, "a botch job".

It was designed for a Honda engine, and it was not until December that the team knew they would be using a Mercedes. That necessitated some pretty crude changes.

"The chassis had the back six inches cut off to fit the engine in - the sort of thing you wouldn't normally do even with a test car," says my source. "And the gearbox was in the wrong place because the crank-centre height is different. There's a massive amount of compromise in the cars."

Those compromises introduced a significant performance deficit into the Brawn car, but it raced like that all year.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/legacy/andrewbenson/2009/10/the_remarkable_story_of_brawn.html


Ok maybe not upside down, but still clearly severly hampered all year - which in essense is what I was alluding to (for all you who want to split hairs)
 
It's a bit poor that the only engine excluded from making mid-season improvements is Honda. Whereas there are clear pros and cons for opening or restricting development (even if it has happened by accident), keep it the same for everyone. Hope common sense, for once, is used.
 
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