After a three-week session of tests in Barcelona, all the ten teams have now revealed their single seaters for this year. Engineers, drivers and designers, tried to have a quick view on what their rivalries have been on in the last months of work, after Abu Dhabi.

Mercedes’s Technical director, Mike Elliott, seemed very focused on his work and the work of his team, and admitted: “I have not spent a lot of time looking at the other cars. We tried to fix our issues and we let do this kind of work to our men in the factory in Brackley.”

What has intrigued the most the men of the English team are indeed, the sidepods of Red Bull’s RB18.

With the change of regulations, F1 cars, completely changed their look. Sidepods are different on each car, and Mike Elliott tried to explain why: “I guess there are different concepts. In terms of what is happening with these regulations, we completely change the way of managing the wheel wake. That was done to make it better for overtaking, that we couldn’t over-optimise and control the tyre flows, and then for that to break down behind another car.”

Each team has decided to adopt a different design of this specific part of the car; Elliot added: “All the teams have taken different approaches to that. Some have gone for big wide bodyworks, trying to control the tyre wake that way. We got a narrower solution, and we’ve packaged the car to be able to do that.”

“The cars will change a lot from Barcelona sessions to race one. But in the end, all the different designs have the same purpose: to control that front tyre wake”.

Spot the differences, sidepod style 😏🔎#F1 pic.twitter.com/5RfUTGDYSK

— Formula 1 (@F1) February 23, 2022