WATCH: Mercedes’ 2021 Challenger W12 Roars to Life in Fire up

Mercedes are getting ready to launch their new car, the W12, for the upcoming 2021 season. The German team in preparation for the launch have done their first fire-up of the engine on February 18. 

This engine will power not just their car but also, the Williams, Aston Martin, and McLaren cars on the grid for 2021.

A fire-up of an F1 engine is essentially a test to check whether the engine is functioning properly. It is a very important part of preparing for the new season.

Every team generally succeeds while doing so because they would have made the required tweaks before putting the engine fire-up clip on their social media platforms.

Mercedes engine purring

The sound of the Mercedes engine seems very healthy indeed. They have ticked this off from the checklist of things to do before getting the car up and running for the winter testing session in Bahrain.

They have, however, encountered a few problems in the design of the power unit in the lead up to this.

The new managing director of Mercedes-AMG High-Performance Powertrains, Hywel Thomas, said in an interview with Mercedes, that there were a few issues to iron out. He said, “We have got some issues with the power units. We know we have issues but we have plenty of plans in place to fix all of those issues. I’m sure it will all be ready for the first race.”

He is also confident of delivering good engines for their customer teams as well. He said, “In terms of readiness, we’ve got plenty of engines in build at the moment getting ready for the new season. We have already got some of them together and we have also got engines running on the dynos right now, doing their durability runs.”

“There are also engines for our customers too, which are already with them and either in the back of their chassis and fired up or in the process of doing so.”

Will there be a stumble from the team in 2021?

The Brackley based team will be hoping their 2021 car can give them a great chance of winning both the Driver’s and Constructor’s Titles. But, the frustration behind the scenes over the power units gives all the other team’s on the grid.

They also faced this issue before the 2020 season with their horror winter testing at Barcelona. But, the pause for the CoronaVirus pandemic gave them sufficient time to rectify the mistakes. They won’t have such a luxury this time. So, other teams can be happy at this possibility.