There will be teams that find the key to the new regulation and find tenths in places that others did not imagine. There will also be teams that come face to face with reality, and it will only be possible to find out when the 2022 F1s hit the asphalt at the Bahrain GP (March 20) or, to a lesser extent, when they show up at the tests of Barcelona pre-season (February 23) or Sakhir (March 10). so wait for it James Allison, technical director of Mercedes, amused and resigned in a video shared by the Brackley team: “I imagine, bearing in mind that the cars are so new and so different, that one or two cars on the grid will have got it all wrong And they will have a terribly painful year.”
“Everyone on our team, and everyone on the rest of the teams, will have done their best job of finding and design a concept that fits happily with the new rules. We will realize together at the beginning of the season, in the races, how the grid has been shaken or not. I imagine that all of us, in one way or another, will have pending details (in the car) or that we did not know how to anticipate. And we will look at other people’s cars to tell ourselves: why don’t we think about this or that?”, Says the British engineer of the team that defends the constructors’ title for the eighth consecutive year.
“It’s going to be very intense and without a doubt, something that will take away hours of sleep during the year”, augurs. If the rivals, be it Red Bull, Ferrari or McLaren, find an aerodynamic solution that makes a difference, it will be necessary to copy: “We will try to bring that idea to the car as quickly as possible, to be able to progress from the position in which we start the championship. If we’re lucky, we’ll be up front, and we’ll try to keep the wolves behind.” “When the rules change at such a high level, like these, we approach it with fun, but as a challenge. Our job is to find technical opportunities and use our skill and effort to set up the car better than anyone else. When everything is so new, In either direction there are opportunities, but there are also risks,” Allison, 53, thinks.
W13 earrings… and Hamilton
The Mercedes W13, without superstitions, will be presented on February 18 with the unknown Lewis Hamilton, who remains in absolute media silence since the Abu Dhabi GP, controversial for his team and victorious for Verstappen and Red Bull. From England, certain pressures were filtered towards the FIA so that the procedure of the safety car in that outcome is investigated, with pressure also on figures such as Michael Masi, race director. All in all, it seems unlikely that the seven-time champion will not be part of next year’s grid. Among other things because, without Hamilton, Mercedes would have a much bigger problem than developing the new car: finding a replacement for the most successful driver in history. They wouldn’t have much time to post funny videos, and it wouldn’t be easy to hide the search for a pilot from the press, either.