German Car Zone

Engine, gearbox, KERS package announced

Hot on the heels of a split with engine supplier Ferrari, Force India has confirmed a technical partnership with McLaren and Mercedes.

In a long-term deal, the Force India VJM02 cars will be powered by Mercedes, the first time that the manufacturer has supplied another chassis constructor other than McLaren in nearly 15 years.

The Sauber team ran with a Mercedes-branded engine in 1994 before switching to McLaren in 1995. However, the agreement with Force India marks the first occasion that the German engine will be powering two teams simultaneously.

Additionally, Force India will have access to the McLaren's network of suppliers while McLaren will supply the team with gearboxes and hydraulic systems and will provide operational support. Force India also plans to fit its cars with a Kinetic Energy Recovery System (KERS) that is currently being developed by McLaren and Mercedes.

Force India also announced that it is to expand the computational fluid dynamics capability of its Brackley Aero Centre facility in conjunction with aerospace company EADS.

"We are absolutely delighted to be able to announce a technical partnership with McLaren Applied Technologies and Mercedes-Benz HighPerformanceEngines, and also our plan to expand the composite manufacturing capability and drawing office within our Silverstone facility," stated team boss Vijay Mallya. "McLaren and Mercedes-Benz are two of the most famous names in motorsport history, having achieved great success in Grand Prix racing over many years. These new resources and developments will provide an enormous boost to our technical armoury and, as a result, we have high hopes of making good progress in 2009 and beyond."

"Force India Formula One Team has been in existence for only one year, and inevitably our first season has constituted a learning period. But we said at the outset that we meant business and were not interested in merely making up the numbers," he added.


Source: F1 : Force India confirm McLaren Mercedes deal - FORCE_INDIA - F1-Live.com

Cool

^Yep but i wonder why they split with Ferrari?

They wanted the best engine on the grid

^Yeah definitely that

Word. Mclaren's engine the recent two seasons has been superb with better reliability than Ferrari's engine.

Why did they split with Ferrari... They want to score in the points!!!

They better do it next year or else they should exit F1. With Torro Rosso having climbed ranks battling with the big boys, Force India are hopelessly let at the bottom all alone failing to make it to the podium, let alone score a point this year.

The reason why they have split with Ferrari has nothing to do with the greatness of the engine, as top 3 engines offer more or less the same caracteritics, they have split simply because Ferrari wasn't able to offer the full KERS+Gearbox+Engine+Hydraulics package since they were providing powertrains to 2 teams.