Niki Lauda, triple F1 world champion and current non-executive chairman for Mercedes, said that the Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 team is very competitive and should be able to challenge the top 3 teams in the sport. This is based on the team’s performance in the recently concluded winter preseason testing in Jerez, Spain, where Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton took the F1 W04 for several race distances.
“My big joy is that the Mercedes can now compete with the top three teams,” said Lauda in an interview with Bild. He added that he thought reigning champion Sebastian Vettel was still the fastest driver out there on the track, and that Vettel’s Red Bull was just a tad faster than the rest of the crop at the moment.
He also made comments about the stuggles some of the smaller teams in F1 are facing, particularly financially. He stated that those who entered the sport “chooses to” and thus, he feels no sense of pity for those teams. He added that F1 will continue to weather financial problems, as it has done in the past few decades when such problems arose.
Of course, as far as the Mercedes team’s performance goes, there’s still a lot of room for improvement. Plus, the addition of Lewis Hamilton only adds more pressure for the team to win big now and really hang with the top teams. After all, Lauda was part of the team that negotiated Hamilton’s 3-year deal with the Mercedes team.
There’s only several weeks to go before the 2013 F1 season starts, so then we’ll find out just how competitive the team is.
[Photo Credit: Gregory Moine on Flickr]
We could all agree for sure that Mercedes-Benz is definitely a revolutionary car brand. For generations, Mercedes-Benz never ceased to amaze people with their innovations in terms of performance, features, design and other awesome factors.
But when Dr. Dieter Zetsche tried to put emphasis on the revolutionary characteristic of the brand by featuring Ernesto "Che" Guevara, it sparked the ire of the key political figures in the Cuban-American community and two prominent lawmakers in the U.S. according to Fox News.
The news source said that the incident occurred during the keynote speech of the Daimler CEO at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Apparently, the image of the Cuban revolutionary was used by Zetsche for a brief moment during his PowerPoint presentation. His purpose was just to illustrate his point to the audience about the revolution taken by the Mercedes brand in technology. But the flashing of that image was enough to create controversy.
Daimler was quick to offer an apology by saying that it was a thoughtless and stupid decision on their part. However, it was not their intention to offend people.
Despite that, Florida Representative Mario Diaz-Balart, who was among the critics, lashed out that the apology is pathetic. He said that Che is a cold-blooded killing machine who wanted to erase capitalists from the face of the earth.Another Florida representative by the name Ileana Ros-Lehtinen said that the German automaker should be ashamed for using a murderer to promote their brand.
As a result, a Daimler spokesperson further stated that the use of the image was only viewed in a bad light. The company is not, in any way, condoning the life, actions or political philosophy of the former Cuban political figure.
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