Mercedes believes it's solved torque sensor glitches

Mercedes-AMG Customer Racing boss Stefan Wendl is confident that the initial teething problems for its cars stemming from the introduction of torque sensors have been solved ahead of the Rolex 24.

AMG missed out on IMSA’s Daytona test last November but did manage to test privately at DIS for two days in mid-December, before the five AMG GT3 EVOs in the field all took to the track for the first time in an IMSA session with the sensors last weekend.

Prior to last weekend, Mercedes-AMG also completed extensive dyno testing and track testing at Portimao and Paul Ricard to prepare for the start of the season. But without the ability to run a test car using IMSA’s logging and timing systems, there was more work to be done on the ground in Florida during the Roar Before the 24.

While AMG anticipated that it wouldn’t be plain sailing and moved quickly to find solutions, a significant chunk of the test weekend was spent firefighting. The overarching issue concerned the communication between Mercedes-AMG’s ECU and the IMSA-supplied ECU that controls the power output through the sensors. Chunks of track time were lost, and some of it was spent running the cars unrestricted, much to the frustration of its customer teams.

“We figured out that you need the whole software and hardware network of a race weekend to test everything,” Wendl told RACER. “The cars are now so complex, everything is connected.

“On one hand, the car itself has a software and hardware environment and this needs to be connected now to the IMSA logging system. And then there’s the official timing, with the logging and transponder system. This creates the right numbers when the car resets its energy lap by lap, stint by stint and in the pit lane.

“We could not fit this together outside an official IMSA event and this is what we missed, sadly. We were aware from November onwards that this would be a big challenge. So we prepared our customers for the potential challenges we would face when everything is together.

“We also prepared our software guys in Germany — we had them on standby and in the first session when we rolled out, we figured out that our workaround for the initial problem with not receiving the channels from IMSA from the torque sensors in the right cambers.”

Fortunately, Mercedes-AMG’s band of staff worked overtime remotely to develop a solution for the morning of the second day.

“We made a workaround to survive the first day, then we figured out other things with the official timing were not working correctly and we fixed them overnight,” Wendl said. “This was with a firmware update. We didn’t change the programming itself — the programming was ready with all the logic and functions. We just needed to route it the right way so that the program accepts the data input.

“Now the system has been running since Saturday morning. Our developers in Germany worked through the night to make it ready. Now we go through the process of collecting data with the cars and make a base recommendation for setup. We also ran a workshop with all the teams together to share experience with the system. We can all learn from each other as we are at a very early stage.”

The big question is how much of an impact this will all have on Mercedes-AMG’s ability to fight for victory on the weekend, and in the case of GTD, successfully defend its Rolex 24 crown? Free Practice 1 is now in the books, and so far so good. Wendl, though, is keen to manage expectations.

“Now we have the new system and we have to learn,” he stressed. “We are a little bit on the back foot — I do not see us as the favorite based on the lack of experience with the new system. But we are challenging ourselves to speed the process up and we will see. I think this is going to be a very tight competition and I hope we can play a role to fight for victory.”