Ross Brawn has expressed his surprise at Mercedes’s new curved ‘no’ sidepod concept stating that he didn’t expect such a radical concept to be produced.

The reigning constructors’ champions revealed an eye-catchingly different version of the W13 just before the start of this morning’s session in Bahrain, with the team’s new challenger now featuring an extremely curved ‘no’ sidepod, an evolution of the more traditional version of sidepod that the team used in Barcelona.

Brawn, who is Formula 1’s director of motorsport after stints as technical director and team principal at Benetton, Ferrari, Brawn and Mercedes, said that the Brackley based team’s innovation came about because of an engineer finding a loophole in the new regulations.

“I think it’s impossible to anticipate the creative scope of the teams; once they get the regs, you’ve got thousands of engineers working on all the regulations and how they can use them (to their benefit).”

“So some of the solutions honestly we never anticipated, I think there’s no doubt that the Mercedes concept, we didn’t anticipate. It’s a very extreme interpretation of the regulation, and I think there’s going to be, inevitably, a lot of debate about their interpretation, and that’s what happens with new regs. However hard you try to close off all the options, and believe me, we closed off hundreds of them, the innovation in F1 is always extreme.”

However, not everyone was impressed with Mercedes’s new look ‘no’ sidepods, with Red Bull’s Christian Horner immediately questioning the legality of the W13 to German publication Auto Motor und Sport whilst also being of the opinion that the car didn’t fit the spirit of the regulations.

But Brawn disagreed with Horner’s comments as he claimed that there were no early indications that Mercedes had breached the regulations with their new sidepods.

“We will go back and investigate those solutions and make sure they maintain the objectives of the new rules. I think they do; our initial impressions are there’s nothing here we would be overly concerned about in terms of those objectives of the regulations. I think there’s going to be a lot of debate in the next few days.”

“(The) spirit is a grey area. One significant thing we changed was the governance. In the past, you needed everybody to agree to a change in the season, now it’s 80%, as long as the FIA and F1 also agree. So, I think once the interpretation Mercedes has made has been understood, then we can get a balanced view, or we can take a view of its impact, what effect it is going to have.”