Mercedes chief technical officer James Allison feels that some F1 teams are likely to get the 2022 car design completely wrong.
The start of the 2022 F1 season is just over two months away. Ahead of the new campaign, teams and drivers are gearing up for major regulation changes that are expected to shake the field up.
F1 announced last year that the cars would go through significant aerodynamic changes, that will produce ‘lesser dirty air’. As a result, drivers would be able to follow the cars ahead of them more closely, providing them with more overtaking opportunities.
These changes mean that the car designs will be drastically different from their predecessors. With so little time left, teams are now in closing stages in terms of designing their cars. Drivers will first get a chance to test their cars out in next month’s pre-season testing session in Barcelona.
Our 2022 car, how you doin’ 😍#F1 #F12022 pic.twitter.com/vzVBxxtY22
— Formula 1 (@F1) July 15, 2021
In a video released by Mercedes, their chief technical officer James Allison shared his thoughts on the new mechanical packages, teams are developing.
“Everyone in our team, and everyone in every other team, will have done our level best to try to find a design. An approach that will be a happy match to this new regulation set,” said Allison.
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A team that gets stuck with a poorly designed cars will suffer for a long time, says the Mercedes chief.
Teams will definitely need time to understand these regulation changes thoroughly. Allison feels that drivers and the staff would get a better grasp as the season progresses, by comparing their development to those of teams around them.
“We’ll all get to find out together at the start of this season. In the races that unfold from there, exactly how that shakes out,” he continued.
“I would imagine, given that the cars are so new and so different, that one or two cars on the grid will have got it really badly wrong. And they will have a terribly painful year.”
A new era of @F1 starts right here… 👊
Firing up our 2022 F1 car for the first time – the W13 is ALIVE. 🤩 pic.twitter.com/fphuaVp2dI
— Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 Team (@MercedesAMGF1) December 23, 2021
“I would imagine that all of us to some degree will have will have left things on the table. That we just didn’t anticipate. And we will look at other cars and think ‘oh, why didn’t we think of that?’”
“Then we’ll be scrambling around to try to get that idea onto our car as fast as possible. So that we can claw our way, from whatever position we land in that first race, forwards. Or, if we’re lucky enough to be in front, to keep the attacking wolves behind us.”
“It’s going to be quite a rush. Definitely something that’s going to keep us all from having too much sleep. For the whole of the season,” the 53-year old concluded.
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