Elliot: New F1 cars' performance not different from old

The technical director for the eight-time Constructors Champions team was speaking in a video on Mercedes' YouTube channel, discussing the 2022 F1 regulations.

"This year's cars are going to be hugely different," he began. "I think the most visible difference will be in the aerodynamic shape of the car. Not only the aerodynamics are different but the whole way the regulations are constructed are completely different.

"The power-unit for this year is very different as well," Elliot went on. "That's going to be fixed until 2025 and it also has to run what's called E10 fuel, so that's 10% bioethanol, so that makes quite big changes to the power unit.

"We have 18-inch rims and and tires that go with that, so that's gonna be quite a big difference and there's also an increase in mass so I think the cars are going to look very different.

"They're going to perform quite differently and I think that's going to be interesting to watch," he explained.

Elliot believes that the performance of the new generation of F1 cars will not bee that far off from the previous generation, which as things stand now is the fastest crop of F1 racing machine in the history of the sport.

"The overall performance of the new cars is probably not going to be very different from the old," he claimed. "Obviously the intention of these regulations was to try and improve overtaking and it'll be a little bit of time before we can see whether that's actually happened because the cars are a bit heavier."

In its efforts to close up the performance differences between the teams, Formula 1 has mandated that the higher a team places in the Constructors' Championship, the more time is cut from their wind tunnel usage allowance.

With Mercedes being the Constructors Champions for eight years in a row, their time in the wind tunnel is reduced, and Elliot admits the team feels the pressure from that.

He said: "The big challenge over the winter has been the fact 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 year's 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, you know in terms of the design work.

"We're competing against an opposition and what we're really trying to do is just do a better job than they do, but when you get a new set of regulations, it's a new challenge, it's a challenge to start from scratch," Elliot admitted.

Mercedes were locked in a tense title fight with Red Bull throughout the 2021 season, which made it tricky to them in terms of allocating resources to design the new car for 2022, as they were also required to continue developing last year's W12.

"One of the biggest difficulties is developing this car has been about how much resource we could put into it last year," Elliot revealed. "We were fighting for a championship and we needed to make sure that we did a good job with that and we also did a good job with this year's car.

"That was a big challenge you know, particularly now the regulations are such that we've got a cost cap we've also got very limited runs in the wind tunnel so we have to choose really carefully what resource we spend on the 21 car versus what resource would spend on the 22 car," he explained.

Mercedes announced that the new car, the W13, will be revealed on February 18, with the first pre-season testing session in Barcelona schedule between February 23 and 25.

"I'm really looking forward to seeing how the car goes," Elliot said. "In a normal year you've got a pretty good idea what you need to find over the winter.

"With a brand new set of regulations, who knows what's going to turn up? Who knows what the competition will have brought?

"Hopefully we've brought enough that we'll be out in front," the 47-year-old hoped.