The trick in question is that Mercedes found a way to lower their ride height on straight to boost the tops speed, and apparently it has been used for the past several races. It has sparked a lot of noise now, because it has been clearly visible on the footage from Turkish GP, that shows the W12 of Bottas. That lowering of the ride height is believed to stall the diffuser in the car, which aims at increasing the straight-line speed. 

When asked about that system, and if there is anything Red Bull, the main rival for Mercedes could do something about it, Christian Horner, the Team Principal of RB has said: “We’ve got to focus on our strengths. It’s not something that they’ve just introduced. I think it works well at some circuits, perhaps it’s not as use-able at others. We will see. We’ve got some interesting venues coming up that have got all kinds of different challenges so it’s going to stretch both teams to the limit.”

Although Mercedes seems to find a lot of ways to try to come victorious from their fight with Red Bull, reliability seems to be an issue for the team this season. For the US GP, they had to accept another penalty for Valtteri Bottas, after they exceeded the maximum allocation of power unit parts in his car. Horner didn’t hold back to comment on that. As he said: “They’re obviously weighing up that risk versus reward. It’s very unusual for Mercedes [who] have been obviously the benchmark of reliability the last six, seven years. It’s unusual that they’re in this situation. We are pushing them hard this year. We’re really throwing everything at this season and pretty much every race we’ve managed to give him a hard time.”

Although many teams have already halted development of their 2021 cars and moved onto the challenge of 2022, it seems that Red Bull is still considering updates if needed. As said by Horner: “Obviously 2022 is a big factor within all the teams at the moment, so it’s making the best of what we have. If there’s something that we can get on the car, obviously we will.”