The new technical regulations seemed to be made to avoid unique interpretations, but after the first week of Formula 1 pre-season testing at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, it seems that this has not been the case.
For example, almost every team on the grid has found its own solution on the nose and front wing, however the most striking differences are in the various sidepods.
Each team has interpreted the regulations in its own way, but the pontoons that have stood out the most are those of Red Bull. The RB18 features an aggressive design created by Adrian Newey , with a large cutout between the air intake and the floor of the car.
In Barcelona the teams had their first chance to really look at each other’s cars. Mercedes technical director Mike Elliott highlighted the RB18’s sidepods: “Honestly, I haven’t looked at the other cars much. We’ve been trying to work and solve our problems, but visually, the most different thing has been the Red Bull sidepods. That looks interesting. , so let’s take a closer look at it.”
Last season, Mercedes and Red Bull reached a level of tension that had been all but forgotten in the Formula 1 world, as their battles for the drivers’ and constructors’ titles came alive at the final race.
For that reason, from both sides they will surely have the magnifying glass on the rival garage with more emphasis than ever before the start of a new season that is expected to even out the grid even more, so any detail will count at the end of the course and nobody you want to miss nothing.
Mercedes also suffers from porpoising in its 2022 F1
If there is a word that stands out above the rest at the beginning of this era, it is undoubtedly porposing . This phenomenon is being a real headache for all the teams on the grid, since to a lesser or greater extent, they were surprised by this curious phenomenon in the first pre-season tests.
Mercedes , unlike other occasions in the past, has not been able to escape these problems either, however, and according to Mike Elliott , they are already working on it to try to solve it or at least minimize its impact ahead of the first Grand Prix of 2022.
“Even the cars that are less affected, you see them suffer on the straights with, for example, the DRS open. I think it is a problem that we all face. The reality is that we need to learn as quickly as possible. We tried so much as possible on the track and we do a lot of simulation work in the factory, but the objective is the same, to see how we solve that, or at least how we minimize it for the first few races”, concluded the technical director of the star team.
