Mercedes AMG’s contender for the 2019 season, the W10 EQ Power+ had the unenviable task of continuing Mercedes’ supremacy in the hybrid era of Formula 1. Driven by Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas, in their seventh and third seasons with the team respectively, the W10 dominated the season, powering Mercedes to their sixth consecutive Constructors’ Championship win, becoming only the second team in Formula 1 history to achieve this.
Hamilton also took his sixth Drivers’ title, establishing himself out as the second most successful F1 driver of all time, behind only Michael Schumacher. The sheer ascendancy of the W10 was preposterous, so much so that the Constructors’ Championship title was essentially decided in the first half of the season. It took until the sixth race in Monaco for a rival to stop the team from gaining a 1-2 victory, setting a record for consecutive 1-2 finishes in the process, and it wasn’t until Austria, nine races into the season, that another driver other than Hamilton or Bottas finished on the top step of the podium. Though not even the team’s most dominant season in history, the team still scored 15 victories our of a possible 21 and earned a win percentage of 71.4%.
Development of the W10 began at the end of the 2017 season and, over the course of the 2018 season, even whilst Mercedes were still in the midst of an exciting and challenging Championship fight, more engineers at Brixworth and Brackley were assigned to the project. In fact, in the chassis team, more than half of the engineers in the Design Office were working on the W10 by the summer break. By October, when the team were wrapping up the Championship, the whole factory was working flat out, designing and producing parts of the future contender.
Compared to its predecessor, the W10 changed substantially. The majority of those modifications were driven by the significant changes to the Technical Regulations for the 2019 Formula One season. In addition to dealing with the changes to the aerodynamic regulations, which were the main focus in the development of the W10, the team worked hard on the suspension and aerodynamic characteristics to deliver a car with improved handling that would be much kinder to its tyres. Even though the minimum weight limit was lifted by 10kg for 2019, weight reduction remained a real challenge. Components that were stripped to the bone in 2018 were taken, one by one, and subjected to a further round of aggressive analysis to shave further weight from them. Collectively, this added up to a handful of kilos that were invested back in the car on aerodynamics, suspension and Power Unit to bring performance.
Overall, the W10 earned 15 wins, 17 further podiums, 10 pole positions and 9 fastest laps, scoring 739 points and winning Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport both the Drivers’ and Constructors’ Championship titles.
This intricately hand-crafted 1:8 scale model of the Mercedes-AMG F1 W10 EQ Power+ was created by the Amalgam Collection, in collaboration with the Memento Group. These exquisite models have been developed in workshops of Amalgam with the assistance of Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team regarding CAD data, original finishes, materials and original drawings. Part of the Memento Group’s official Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team collection, the Mercedes-AMG F1 W10 EQ Power+ has been crafted under licence from Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Limited.
The Mercedes-AMG F1 W10 EQ Power+ is limited to just 99 editions.
Click here for further information
Report by amalgamcollection.com
