Design engineer Gabriel Elias recently returned to his native Florida after spending the past six years employed at Mercedes F1, where he helped to design the cars that have carried the team to the past seven Formula 1 constructors’ championships. When I first began working in Formula 1, my perception of pre-season testing was probably the same as a lot of people’s. You imagine these teams having worked all winter on their new car, and then going to the track for this day of reckoning where they find out whether all that work has paid off with the performance they were expecting. That, and some trepidation about what the opposition has been up to during the off-season. But the truth of...
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