George Russell EXPLAINS his Mercedes Race Seat and Steering Wheel 🔍

[Music] I'm going to take you through my 20203 Mercedes F1 steering wheel I mean as you can see there's so many different buttons different rotaries on here there's thousands and thousands of different setups you can have the but that I use the most will be this white one which is tor so no big prizes if anybody can guess what that is that is the button to talk to my team over time you learn exactly where every single button is but when I hold the steering wheel you'll see that everything is within one movement away so I don't have to move my hand so much my thumb reaches all of these buttons quite easily where whether it's one of these rotaries the only time you have to take your hand off is when you're changing the strap mode and the main function of this is how much battery is used for a given lap so for a qualifying lap we would go to the purple position Strat two which is where I'm in at the moment Strat two is basically there to deploy all of the battery so that qualifying lap is like a Sprint you want that 100% battery at the beginning in and you want to finish when you cross the line that qualifying lap at 0% use all the battery available this yellow one here which is the pit lane speed limiter so you come to the pit lay and your brake as late as possible I'll click that yellow button and then my speed limit will be on and then once you've done your pit stop you've got out of the pit Lane is really important to click that button again as soon as possible to get going again again when you reenter the track this is the DRS so whenever I click this button the rear wing of the car will open up it will shed all of the drag and we'll probably end up going about 20 to 30 km an hour quicker in the straight so when you're trying to overtake a car that top left button is crucial this one here which says bbell which stands for brake balance so we have four on the car both on the front both on the rear and it depends whether you want that at a perfect 50/50 balance most of the time most teams most cars you run the brake balance around 58% and the reason you got more on the front is because when the car breaks into a corner all of that weight is being pushed onto the front tires onto the front axle of the car and you need to have more of the brakes on the front to deal with that extra pressure that you're feeling so if you're struggling with locking the front tires as you see you go into a corner a driver turns you got smoke coming from the tire you might want to bring that balance a bit more rearwards so that's a really useful tool the end button here is not a button you want to be pressing when you're out on track because that is the neutral button you'll pull into the pit Bay in first gear click click the M button and you're down into neutral so you can take your hands off the clutch and the car can uh be looked after by the mechanics but the other thing with this button if you press and hold it is the reverse button so during a lap you're constantly tweaking these settings to really get the most out of your car over the course of a lap you're probably making five or six changes a lap just as the cars evolving the tires are getting hotter as you progress through a lap uh and you need to have a sort of unique setting for each individual scenario so it's not it's not really a Cas so just you set it up and and Away you go you've got to you got to find true of these things so this is my 2023 race seat I find the the seat pretty comfortable to be honest this is absolutely tailor made to my body so how this is made is we sit in a big bag of foam and as that foam is in liquid it sort of goes all around your your body it expands and once the foam has set it's basically got a mold of your body so this only weighs I think less than 2 kilos is incredibly light for for the size of it but when you're Racing for getting on for 2 hours you want to be in a comfy position so this is roughly the angle of which we're sat obviously very very reclined and a couple of reasons for that we want to get the center of gravity as low as possible obviously if I sat really upright like this as you would be let's say an ordinary chair all of that weight from your body and your and your head is is quite up high and that makes the car go slower so that is not what we want the way the seat fits into the car is with these four pins so we got one pin here one pin there and the same on the other side so that literally just slot straight into the car and then we've got these flags at the top these carbon fiber flags and that fits perfectly flush into the car so once my shoulders are in it can't Flex where these green stickers are is where the extraction Buckle is so what this is is if ever you're in a big incident and the medical team need to lift you out of the car they will strap into these six plugs and this seat will effectively just sort of slide out of the car with me strapped in there hopefully that's the position you never want to be in but it's good to know that the team can get you out we have six straps to Hold Us in so we have the lap strap which will come from the bottom of the chassis over the seat and across my lap where a little Buckle holding it into position we've got the shoulder strap which will come from the chassis over my shoulder and meet that lap strap in the middle and then just underneath you see that little hole in the bottom of the seat and there your crotch straps so they'll come from from the chassis on the floor under the seat up the seat through this Gap these crotch straps are really important because if they're not tight enough when we're breaking and you got five or six Shield Force Under breaking it's sometimes possible that you slide in the seat and you sort of get a bit lower and that's not a comfortable position to be in equally it's really important that these rib support is as tight as possible to your ribs so when you're going around the corner you're not being B around and it's sort of lock dim position but on the flip side if they're too high it's going to start catching on the side and so it's a really fine line of having the height to give you the support but not being high enough that it catches your bicep the car is so small you got to find these these margins to just get enough but not too much and then finally in my seat there's a little cut out along my spine which is filled in with phone just to give me a little bit of support on my spine for for obvious reasons and equally on my shoulders so I've just got a bit of padding in here as i' got quite bony shoulders I like to have a little bit of support so these three pads help a bit to not bruise me up and that's the race seat

Channel: Sky Sports F1

Views: 450,577

Keywords: Formula 1, F1, Formula One, Sky Sports, Sky F1, Sky Sports F1, George Russell, Russell explains, Race seat, Race seat F1, Steering wheel F1, F1 steering wheel, how does an F1 car work?, How does an F1 steering wheel work, how does F1 seat work, mercedes, Mercedes race seat, Mercedes car, Mercedes F1 car

Id: aKfdaJZJBko

Length: 8min 34sec (514 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 01 2023