The championship is yet to start, but the first controversy has already sparked. Mercedes showed up at the second round of tests of the year with a rather different car to the one presented in Barcelona.

The external key point of the upgrades introduced by the German team is the sidepods appeareance, which have considerably shrunk in size and were apparently among the concepts studied by Ferrari for their 2022 challenger as well in spite of not being in the final project of the F1-75, going as far as to gain attention from Christian Horner.

The FIA has set the record straight on the legality of the design, as Head of Single-seater matters Nikolas Tombazis told Autosport that the sidepods are an area where it was decided to leave more freedom to the teams' engineers, since it was less aereodynamically important than others.

"We did consciously free up the sidepods more than we did other areas. We could easily have written rules for the sidepods that would have been all the same if we wanted to. We didn't do that because we felt it was an opportunity."

"So in that respect, that wasn't totally random that happened with the sidepods," he highlighted.

Tombazis, however, wasn't banking on a team to pursue an aereodynamical concept so far from the original model, as he went on to add:

"If you asked me whether I expected to see the variety of the solutions that teams produced in the sidepods, then no, that exceeded what I was imagining, I must say."

The new regulations have been written in a way that allows more flexibility, to "react more easily for correcting regulations", but "not so much to go and say a car is illegal or something like that".

The FIA representative also highlighted the importance of the hard work and the time involved in projecting the 2022 cars according to the new regulations:

"I don't think teams designed a car in any particular way, just because they liked us, they still made what they think is the fastest car and the best interpretation. They worked really hard on the regulations like one would expect them to do."

As it happens for every great modification, there's still room for improvements, Tombazis said, with the new regulations to be evaluated during the whole season to ensure the best possible level of racing: 

"I think by and large, the regulations were reasonably well written. Some areas were not perfect, and will be tweaked in the future. We still have to follow the governance, the governance has voting and so on."

"We don't pluck it out of thin air and say here are the new regulations," he concluded.