2022 is a year full of changes in F1, the biggest one are the new car regulations, expecting to improve racing during the season.

Mike Elliott, Technology Director of the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team, said:

“The big challenge over the winter has been the facts that we have less runs to use in the wind tunnel so that's been challenging, trying to work out how much we should have spent on last´s years car versus how much we should have spent on this year´s car.” 

“And this has knock-on consequences all the way through the factory in terms of the design work early on things like gearboxes and chassis particularly because the gearbox is fixed for a period of time, we´ve had to get that right.” 

“But once we then begin to understand what the aerodynamics are going to look like and how that's going to knock onto the rest of the car, we then get into sort of the detailed design work and thats been huge over winter and so this sort of approach we take is it's just the same approach we take every year, it's just more difficult because the rules changes much more than we have seen in the past.”

“As an engineer our job is to try and get the most from the car we are competing against, and what we are really trying to do is just do a better job than they do.”

“When you get a new set of regulations it's a new challenge to start from scratch.”

“In most years where we have got carryover regulations you've got a pretty good idea what good looks like, you know what sort of gains you need to make from the previous year's car and you can sort of work in a direction….” 

“When you get a brand new set of regulations you don't know what the limit is, where you can get to and that's exciting for engineers.”

Elliott also talked about when Mercedes started working with the new regulations and how Covid interrupted the development:

“We first started working on the regulations for the 2022 car back in the start of 2020 and we have done all the initial work in CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) and the wind tunnel as well the big development items like gearboxes has started but as covid kicked in it became clear that we were going to delay the regulations for a year.” 

“We also had the challenge that we wanted to drop downforce for the 2021 car, it was felt that was a necessary direction the cars were getting too quick so we had to turn all of our focus back to the 2021 car and it wasn't until the beginning of 2021 that we could actually get back on and work on the 2022 car and all though that it was about trying to balance the development of the current car versus the future car.”

Elliott mentioned how different it was to work with the new cost cap and limited tests in the wind tunnel so the team had to choose very carefully what to test.