“That is the million-dollar question”– Mercedes is clueless about the benefit other teams having with the new floor regulations.
Mercedes has constantly pointed out their problem with the new floor regulations and feel that it is not suiting to their configuration and benefitting the team on the high rakes.
The same problem has been voiced out by Aston Martin, another team running on low rakes. When SkySports asked Mercedes chief engineer James Allison about the benefit the high rake teams are having, he said they are still figuring it out.
“That is the million-dollar question absolutely no one knows,” the Mercedes technical director told Sky Sports. “Certainly, every team will be sitting there in a fog of paranoia, thinking this is definitely worse for us than anyone else.”
“Unless you’re a real anorak, you wouldn’t even notice that this slither has gone, but for all the people that actually have to put downforce on cars, that was a screaming moment because this bit of the car around the rear wheel is insanely sensitive,” he said.
“That’s where a mass amount of lap time comes from and when you are forced to strip material away from here, you haemorrhage lap time of the car.
“When you’ve seen drivers have punctures during a race, sometimes their rear tyre after being punctured starts to shred the bodywork in that part of the car, and it actually whips away the carbon off the front of the floor.
“That car, even when it gets its fresh tyres in the pits, it just goes backwards…”
The token system was used to treat fears.
When FIA pushed the major freezes back to 2022, there were fears that 2021 would be similar to what we experience in the last seven years, but Shovlin said that is why the token system was introduced.
“I think that’s what the token system was designed to address,” he said. “You didn’t want people or teams feeling like their fate was set sometime in 2019, and the decisions they took in 2019 were then baked into 2020 cars that are then forced to be there in every single respect in 2021.”
