Mercedes-Benz has flat out denied it’s outspending every other team in Formula One in an effort to continue its dominance of the sport.
The Mercedes-AMG F1 team won 16 out of 19 GPs last year and has already won eight from 10 this year.
But the Mercedes-Benz board member in charge of development, Dr Thomas Weber, refutes suggestions his team is buying its success.
“Our budget is definitely smaller than the others. I don’t even think we would be second,” the German engineer insisted.
“Remember, we were the first to do everything possible to harmonise the regulations to reduce the costs
“This legislation change to be much closer to production cars made us happy.”
In spite of Dr Weber’s insistence, rumours persist that it has found a way to move some of the costs of its British-based F1 team onto its production-car books.
“People have said that, because the engine group is part of our research and development group, but it comes out of the F1 budget.
“At the end it (F1) is a marketing exercise, not an engineering exercise, but we get a surprising amount from the engineering point of view. I am deeply convinced we can learn a lot.
“The drivetrain is different. From the engineering it’s completely similar, though. Light-weight technologies and construction, stiff chassis, ignition and combustion technologies. We also push to do that in production.
Dr Weber says he’s not naïve enough to think people would believe there is much of a technology transfer from F1 to road cars, but, he insisted, that’s not the point.
“The main synergies we want to have is in hardware, but even more important is the process knowledge.
“Every two weeks they have to show up with perfect solutions and mitigate failures and maximise their hardware with minimal testing. We do much more testing in series production and still have failures, so we can learn from them there.
"Every time we are with them, problems are popping up because they are so close to the limits. But it’s all of these issues and how those materials like coolants work with different materials. It’s these processes that are intriguing for us.”