Mercedes Formula One team technical director James Ellison said in an interview with reporters that after the FIA rejected the original idea, the FIA did not expect the team to be able to Make its dual axle steering system (DAS) completely legal.
Earlier this year, Mercedes caused a sensation during the pre-season winter test held at the Catalonia Circuit in Barcelona, Spain. At that time, the TV screen on the car showed that the driver was on the straight. Moving the W11 steering wheel back and forth, the front wheel toe angle responded.
competitors questioned the legality of the dual-axle steering system, but the FIA subsequently confirmed that the system has been evaluated and approved.
James Ellison said that the team plans to use the lever system on the steering wheel to run DAS in 2019, but the FIA rejected this arrangement and suggested that the entire steering wheel must be moved.
In response to a car fan’s question about how difficult this system is, James Ellison said that the FIA did not expect the team to succeed.
"The simple answer is that it is really difficult." James Ellison explained in an official video released by the Mercedes team, "In fact, we initially wanted to introduce this technology in 2019. We showed our ideas to the FIA and explained why we thought it was legal. They reluctantly agreed that dual-axle steering is actually legal, but they didn’t like our approach because the second axis was passed through the wheels. Leverage, not the movement of the entire wheel.”
” So they said, “No, you have to adjust the entire steering wheel to control the wheel.” I think we will give up when they say they hope it’s too difficult The idea of continuing to research and develop will no longer cause them trouble.”
James Ellison said that the research and development team believes that it is still worthwhile to invest resources to solve this problem.
"We have a very creative chief designer, John Owen, who took a look at this challenge-he has a good intuition about whether something is possible, which is a very helpful feature , Because it allows us to invest bravely when most people feel that the result is very uncertain.”
This sentence means: “John is very interested in whether he can get out of the predicament and re-enter a good prospect. Confident. John accepted this challenge, thought he could do it, and gave it to our group of talented mechanical designers. They came up with two or three possible methods."
"We chose these three The most likely of them (for follow-up research and development and testing work), about a year later, the DAS system you saw before the start of the season appeared."
