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November 21, 2011 | 
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After taking pole position in Melbourne and Sepang, Sebastian Vettel once again starts from P1 in Shanghai for the Chinese Grand Prix.
The Red Bull driver laid down a benchmark time of 01:33.706 minutes early on in the decisive third qualifying session, one that opposition were never going to match.
The reigning world champion was quite literally given a boost by the Red Bull KERS system this morning, while his team-mate had to make do without; worse still, Webber was eliminated as early as Q1 after making a tactical error in the choice of tyres.
Starting next to Vettel on the front row will be Jenson Button who managed to edge out team-mate Lewis Hamilton; just four-hundredths of a second separated the two McLarens.
Nico Rosberg also booked himself a place on Row 2, which will certainly have raised a few cheers in the Mercedes garage. The German driver also had the satisfaction of consigning the Ferraris of Felipe Massa and Fernando Alonso to the row behind in fifth and sixth places.
The fourth row is occupied by Jaime Alguersuari and birthday boy Paul di Resta, with Sebastien Buemi and Vitaly Petrov lining up behind. Which means that both Toro Rossos and one Force India have made it into the Top 10 – quite a surprise. Petrov played no further part in Q3, having finished the second session marooned on the track.
The first section of qualifying was a prolonged battle to see who would be joining the six drivers of the new teams for an early bath. Mark Webber went into qualifying without the benefit of KERS. Even so, he was not expecting to go out in Q1 as a lowly 18th – after all, he is driving one of the two fastest cars in China.
“We thought we had enough pace to complete one lap on the hard tyres,” said Webber, attempting to justify his one and only qualifying outing on the Pirelli hard compound, “But I couldn’t get them to work properly, so I wasn’t fast enough.”
The soft tyre would have been the safe option, but Red Bull miscalculated.
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On Wednesday morning, August 20, 1975, the phone rang in my dingy beige apartment in Burlington, Ontario. I had just put in 30 consecutive hours of writing, editing, and laying out race reports for
CAR Weekly , which we sometimes spelled “Weakly” because there were only five of us and we possessed merely the slimmest notion of what we were doing. On the phone, the editor said, “You gotta come back in. Mark Donohue died last night. We need an obit.”
Warming up for the Austrian Grand Prix, my hero, Donohue, 38, had spun his March at 150 mph and struck his head on a metal bar supporting a sign. He died two days later.
It was hard to believe because Donohue and team owner Roger Penske were then the cleverest guys in racing. Donohue, equipped with a mechanical-engineering degree from Brown University, approached car setup not with pet theories or traditional wisdom but with a slide rule, an overarching grasp of how physics strives to thwart a race car’s mission, and 300 push-ups daily. When Penske Racing took delivery of a Ferrari 512M, for instance, they immediately fabricated a bigger rear wing. Ferrari’s chief engineer Mauro Forghieri glared at it and said, “They’ll never let you run that wing at Le Mans.” Mark replied, “Well, I wouldn’t want to run this wing at Le Mans, would I?”
“Partly because we were both engineers, Mark and I hit it off,” recalls Patrick Bedard. “He had one religion: testing. If he didn’t test a car before a race, he didn’t have his
Peanuts security blanket and would fret that his edge was lost.”
But his edge was rarely lost. In his career, Donohue started 311 races and won 119 of them, a winning average of 38 percent. Of 55 Trans-Ams he entered, he won 29.
“I think I was the first guy to assert that Mark was a better driver than an engineer,” says Bedard. When Donohue took the Ferrari to Le Mans, the car attained only 205 mph on the straight versus the Porsche 917’s 235 mph. “The Ferrari lived up to none of Mark’s calculations, and he was devastated,” Bedard recalls. “So they fiddled with it in non-meaningful ways, then Mark went back out.” He gained 11.5 seconds—the quickest Ferrari in the field and fourth overall. “He did it through sheer force of will. Mark told me, ‘Sometimes you just have to get it done.’”
“That was my take, too,” says Michael Argetsinger, who has just written a riveting biography called
Mark Donohue: Technical Excellence at Speed (David Bull Publishing, $39.95). “It is core to the myth of Mark that he was just an okay driver but a genius engineer. Not true. In everything he drove—even an Elva Courier and a Cobra, cars he didn’t develop—he still won. In fact, Mark often wasn’t the engineer at all. The real engineers were Don Cox [from GM] and Helmut Flegl [from Porsche].” It was largely Flegl who created the Porsche 917-30, whose 1100 horsepower, the SCCA bitched, was killing the Can-Am series. Donohue disagreed. “We’re far from having too much horsepower,” he asserted. “My definition of too much horsepower is when all four wheels are spinning in every gear.”
Burge Hulett, Donohue’s lifelong friend, told Bedard: “Mark was actually a bit of a doofus, awkward everywhere except behind the wheel. There, he was God—that was his way of distinguishing himself.” His divine touch extended to his street cars; a friend once described riding in Donohue’s Porsche
as “a Wall of Death thing most of the time.”
The relentless pursuit of perfection eventually took its toll. “First to go was his marriage,” says Argetsinger. “Mark felt he had to devote all his time to the team. He was sleeping at the shop, and he couldn’t say no to Roger—couldn’t decline more development, more cars, more projects.”
Weary and still recuperating from leg injuries sustained in an awful crash at Road Atlanta—which briefly left him allegedly abusing alcohol—Donohue announced his retirement at the end of ’73. “Except I knew it wouldn’t last,” recalls Penske Racing’s timer/scorer Judy Stropus. “Mark returned [a year later] because he realized he wasn’t good at anything else. He tried to get a car dealership; that didn’t work. He tried to be a team manager; that didn’t work. He needed something he could do well.”
Alas, Penske Racing’s first F1 car, the PC1, was so mediocre that Donohue persuaded Penske to replace it with a customer’s March 751, a curious crack in the myth that was Mark. His son, David, told me: “The legend was that my dad and Roger conquered all. Truth is, they often didn’t know if something would work.”
Thirty-three years after the big crash, Penske told Argetsinger: “Mark was my best friend [this, despite Donohue once spearing his boss with an AMC Javelin in the pits, tossing Penske 15 feet]. What I realize now is that I wouldn’t have succeeded in my other businesses if Mark hadn’t completely taken over the race team.”
In the Penske garage at Indy in ’71, someone—certainly not Donohue or Penske—erected a sign that said: “Those of you who think you know it all are particularly annoying to those of us who do.”
Article source: http://www.caranddriver.com/features/10q1/john_phillips_for_mark_donohue_1100_hp_was_far_from_too_much_-column
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This May, the Mercedes-Benz B-class F-Cell will be the second fuel-cell-powered car to be delivered to consumers (Honda’s
being the first). What you might not know is that Mercedes-Benz was the first manufacturer to produce a fuel-call vehicle. Dubbed the NECAR5 (“new electric car”), it debuted in 1994 and was a single-seat van. Its fuel cell, battery pack, electric drive unit, and associated control devices took up all the interior space, making the van impractical for consumers, or just about anything other than research and marketing.
By 1999, Mercedes had shrunk the size of its system enough so that it could fit into the sandwich-floor architecture of the A-class. That version never made it to production, but in 2004, 10 Berlin residents were given fuel-cell-powered A-classes to drive. Those vehicles were precursors of the 2011 B-class featured here.
Did You Sleep Through Science Class?
The B-class is based on A-class architecture. The aforementioned sandwich design (a hollow void beneath the cabin floor that, among other things, funnels the engine below the passengers in a frontal collision) makes it an ideal candidate for alternative powertrains, as it provides a place to put some of the technology. This B-class actually has identical interior dimensions to its gas- and diesel-powered brethren. The only noticeable difference inside is the lack of a movable cargo shelf; the shelf is locked in the higher (normal to the untrained eye) position to make room for the battery pack.
What makes this B-class F-Cell a zero-emission car is its polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell. Yes, it’s a mouthful. The simple explanation is that the fuel cell converts high-pressure hydrogen (H2) and oxygen (O2, gathered from the air) into electrical energy and water (H2O). It is some fancy chemistry, but it boils down to reverse electrolysis. If you recall junior-high science, when an electrical current is introduced to H20, the result is H2 and O2. For the fuel cell to produce energy and H2O, H2 is fed through a membrane that allows H2 protons, but not H2 electrons, to pass. Those protons join with the O2 on the far side of the membrane to complete H20, and the leftover H2 electrons (once the poles are aligned) generate an electrical current, thus powering the vehicle’s electric motor. Got that? If not, just remember it is reverse electrolysis, and you’ll survive a conversation with anyone holding a liberal-arts degree.
Actually moving the B-class F-Cell from point A to point B is a 134-hp electric motor coupled to a single-speed, direct-drive transmission. On startup, the motor gets the juice for movement from a 1.4-kWh lithium-ion battery array. The battery cells are the same as those used in Mercedes’ S400 hybrid, although there are many more of them here. The fuel cell kicks in at about 7 mph, delivering the needed wattage. The changeover is undetectable unless one is staring at the energy-flow display readout (similar to any hybrid’s display). The fuel cell and the battery will supply juice simultaneously, but only for brief moments, like when passing on the highway. It is similar to an overboost feature on a turbocharged engine. You can engage the battery boost by tripping the kickdown detent in the accelerator, and then the extra grunt can be felt.
Lease Now, Maybe Buy Later
California will get the majority of the 70-or-so F-Cell Bs slated for the U.S., with some ending up in Washington, D.C., too. The first cars will be on the road in May. Mercedes is following the Honda approach to fuel-cell ownership: You can’t own one, at least for now. All the F-Cells will be leased (all maintenance and nonaccident repairs included) for about the cost of a nicely optioned C-class. That translates to a monthly payment of about $800 to $1000, which is quite a bit more than the $600 per month commanded by the Clarity. Also, Mercedes is not sure how many individuals will be getting a B-class. The company wants to have as many people drive the cars as possible, and it hopes to have a majority of the U.S. allotment in fleets. So the LAX Hertz may get a couple to rent.
The is one of the biggest limiting factors to getting hydrogen-powered cars into the garages of the masses. This car’s three 10,153-psi carbon-fiber tanks (total capacity is 8.2 pounds) require H2 flow of about 11,600 psi to top off in about three minutes. By comparison, the FCX stores H2 at 5000 psi, a pressure at which more hydrogen stations can operate, meaning there are more available refueling locations. The Merc’s range is about 250 miles in combined driving situations, so owners won’t want to travel too far from a suitable filling station; 11 such stations are planned for the Los Angeles area by the end of 2010. Mercedes claims there will be 40 stations of this type by 2015. That’s good, because Mercedes also plans to sell—yes, sell, not just lease—fuel-cell vehicles in the U.S. by 2015. We’ll believe that when we see it.
Still a Real Car The utility of the hatchback makes sense to us, but most of our fellow Americans wouldn’t be caught dead in one. Perhaps this B-class’s advanced tech could sway them. The high roofline allows for good front and rear headroom, and there is enough space in the back seat for two adults; three could squeeze in for a short trip. As stated before, cargo space is slightly limited when compared with that of a regular B-class, but there is plenty of room for a four-person weekend getaway.
Driving the F-Cell is relatively benign. There are no weird actuator sounds, no beeps. And there will be no gimmicky clean-energy slogans slathered across the doors, like those on our test car in Europe. The car weighs roughly 3750 pounds (about 550 more pounds than a standard internal-combustion B-class), and it accelerates like any small European compact—slowly, by U.S. standards. The power-to-weight ratio is slightly worse than the FCX’s, so 0-to-60-mph runs in the mid-nines are expected, as are quarter-mile runs in the high 17s. But the low-end torque (max torque is available at 0 rpm) makes it fell rather peppy. Fully electric steering comes without any real feel, but none was expected. The F-Cell uses regenerative braking, and this usually makes for a totally limp-feeling and nonlinear brake pedal. But brake feel, although light, is surprisingly smooth and linear, especially when we compare it to the pedal in the S400. Around town, the F-Cell is eerily silent, with just a little hum from the motor.
Abundant Energy So where does hydrogen come from? Well, it’s the most abundant element in the universe. It’s in the air we breathe. A bunch of it burned up in the
Hindenburg.
And some of the H2 that Americans will be fueling their cars with will come from H2 farming locations. The cleanest of these use renewable energy, like wind, to power the collectors. Hydrogen is also a byproduct of some biomass manufacturing processes. There is enough produced to power about 750,000 cars a year, so Mercedes has a long way to go if it wants to use up all that byproduct H2. The first step is making the technology affordable, but if the inventor of the automobile ends up making production cars powered by fuel cells, then the technology is likely here to stay.
Article source: http://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/car/09q4/2011_mercedes-benz_b-class_f-cell-first_drive_review