Mercedes Chief Technical Officer James Allison expects at least two other teams to get the all-new 2022 F1 regulations “really badly wrong”.
In a video posted by Mercedes titled “Setting the Scene for F1’s New Era”, Allison gave his thoughts on what fans should expect this coming year from the German manufacturer, and the championship as a whole as it embarks a new journey in 2022.
Reigning Constructors’ Champions Mercedes failed to clinch the Drivers’ title in 2021 for the first time since F1’s V6 Turbo Hybrid era came into effect. Red Bull’s 2021 resurgence will naturally be a key player in the outcome of this season for both teams, as a fine line had to be tread last year by those in both outfits delegating how much resource to allocate to the short term versus the long term.
As many regulatory resets in F1’s past show, whoever can break cleanly away from the rest, in terms of on-track performance, will have the advantage for many years to come. Allison though expects the new, most heavily prescribed rules in the history of the championship, to still produce surprises and a shake-up of the order.
In the introductory video, Allison talks about the idea behind the changes which was talked about in 2017 by Ross Brawn. They wished the cars to be closer for better racing and the gap between teams to reduce to ‘within one second’ than the current 2-3s. It was set to make it its debut in 2021 but the pandemic pushed it to 2022 eventually.
Allison doesn’t shed more light on what Mercedes are upto at Brackley and Brixworth as he kept a more general tone in the video, but he feels such changes eventually creates opportunities for some and for some, it will be ‘painful’ if they get it wrong straight up. He also noted the enormity of the change they had to undergo.
“All of us have done our level best, and I’m talking about everyone in our team and everyone in every other team will have done our level best to try to find a design and an approach that will be a happy match to this all-new regulation set,” said Allison.
“We’ll all get to find out together at the start of the season and in the races that unfold from there exactly how that shakes out, but 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 that they will have a terribly painful year.
“I would imagine that all of us to some degree will have left things on the table that we just didn’t anticipate, and we’ll look at other cars and think oh why didn’t we think of that. Then we’ll be scrabbling around to try and get that idea onto our car as fast as possible so that we can claw our way forwards, or if we’re lucky enough to be in front, to keep the attacking wolves behind us,” summed up Allison.
Regarding the opportunity side, Allison added: “When everything is as new as this, then everywhere you look in that regulation set there is opportunity. There’s opportunity and of course there’s jeopardy and we try to pick our way through the potential minefield and pick up all the little boxes of treasure that may be set in amongst the landmines to end up with a car that we hope will see us pitching at the front of the grid.”
The story was written by Danny Herbert
Here’s Toto Wolff on how 2016 was different to 2021
Here’s Valtteri Bottas on getting chance to drive Mercedes 2022 car in sim
Here’s news on Red Bull and Mercedes agreeing to Ben Hodgkinson date
Here’s Max Verstappen on respect for Lewis Hamilton