With the season now archived and the retirement of the latest generation of single-seaters, the teams show a greater propensity to reveal some jealously guarded secrets for the entire span of the championship. This is the case, for example, of the Mercedes, which through Mike Elliott, Technology Director of the team, spoke about the genesis of the W12, the car protagonist of the last world championship, derived from the previous W11. In fact, with the intention of limiting expenses in the period of economic-health emergency coinciding with the Coronavirus pandemic, in view of the 2021 championship, the Federation had imposed the reuse of 2020 cars, limiting their development. The teams were then granted two tokens that could be invested at the discretion of the teams themselves to develop the cars in a defined area.
Mike Elliott has made himself available for an interview with Tech Talk, the official Formula 1 technical in-depth program, during which he answered the specific question about the area in which Mercedes had invested its tokens: “In the end, we didn’t spend our tokens. We had a plan to potentially invest them in the nose, but then we opted not to. The reality is that during the Covid period we were looking at the new regulations for next year, which will lead to some huge aerodynamic changes. For this reason, in preparation for this season, it was a matter of deciding how to divide the resources between the last car and the one for 2022. At the time we had to make these decisions, we also had a decent advantage, as in 2020 we had a very good car and it was a situation in which we mainly wondered what were the weaknesses and which aspects could be developed and improved slightly. There were no big aspects that we wanted to change, as much as small things in the performance of the aerodynamic flows. Looking at the W11 and the W12, the differences are all in the details ”.
The Brackley team therefore won the constructors ‘title and came close to the drivers’ championship with a car whose structure remained identical to 2020. Given the balance between the two leading teams in the second half of the season, Mercedes will remain at home for always the doubt about what the level of competitiveness of the W12 could have been and what the development of the championship would have been if the team had benefited from the investment of the tokens granted by the Federation. 2022 will provide the answers on whether the resources diverted to the design of the next car can put Mercedes again in the position to aspire to the title.
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