Keeping complacency at bay key to Mercedes success - Allison

Mercedes technical director James Allison says a key ingredient of the manufacturer's enduring success in F1 is its refusal to ever rest on its laurels, year in and year out.

Last weekend at the Emilia Romagna GP, Mercedes secured its seventh consecutive world Constructors' championship, surpassing the previous six-title win record held jointly by the Brackley squad and Ferrari.

The coronation at Imola came courtesy of another one-two - the fifth of the season - delivered by Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas.

Mercedes has enjoyed a hegemonic domination in the sport since the advent of the hybrid era in 2014. But the manufacturer's technical excellence has always gone hand in hand with an approach void of complacency or any sense of security says Allison.

"After a number of years of success, what has typically broken a sort of golden run has been not the competitors coming up, but the team itself losing its edge, stopping realising the sort of things that made them good in the past and maybe just falling victim to being a little bit complacent," explained Allison, speaking on F1 TV’s Tech Talk show.

"That is something that we’ve been incredibly conscious of here, the risk of that, and we’ve tried to bend over backwards to counter that risk, and indeed to seek excitement from the beginning of each season, and to try and pump ourselves up to attack it with renewed vigour each year."

Case in point: the multitude of design changes embedded in Mercedes' 2020 W11, a car derived from last year's already remarkable championship winning W10.

"We faced a choice with where to go with the 2020 car," said Allison. "We had a good 2019… we did well and the regs weren’t very different, so why not keep chugging along in the same fashion for 2020?

"But we chose not to do that; we chose to take some different directions with the car, specifically on the front brake drums, on the bodywork around the air intakes and on the rear suspension, all of which were quite significant departures from previous, and all of which bought us the fertile ground on which to build the subsequent development of the car, which has been strong."

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But Allison was also quick to underscore the outstanding and crucial contribution for 2020 of Mercedes' High Performance Powertrains department at Brixworth.

"I would probably make particular note of the huge – and I mean massive – push made by HPP for the PU [power unit] that we’ve had this year," said the British enfineer.

"They had a pretty rough time of it watching races in the season previous and being told that the Mercedes was no longer the pick of the litter.

"And I think that has really spurred them on to finding performance from the PU in every nook and cranny, despite the fact that these regulations have been broadly stable since 2014, and the fuel flow fixed in all that time.

"So I think a really decent step from them."

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