During the 2020 season, the teams and Formula 1 decided to postpone the 2021 rules to the following campaign to help overcome the financial difficulties caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, limited upgrades were allowed, which were restricted to spending two tokens weighted according to the importance of the car part. During the presentation of the W12, Mercedes was quite mysterious with the fate of its tokens , as it kept its development plans secret.
Current technical director James Allison said: “There are some parts of the car that can be changed without tokens, for example the power unit, the cooling systems, the suspension and of course all the aerodynamic surfaces.”
“We have spent our tokens, but we are not yet going to reveal how we have used them. That will become clear in due course.”
But now that the team has secured the constructors’ championship, it has become known that Mercedes never officially spent their tokens and the team’s technical director, Mike Elliott, has confirmed: “I don’t think we have spent the tokens “.
“We had ideas of things that we wanted to do at the front of the car. The reality is that we had plans that we wanted to do, but in the end they didn’t come to fruition.
Motorsport.com understands that a combination of homologation deadlines, a late FIA rule change and the implications of new flat-bottom regulations prevented the team from spending them where they wanted.
As part of the token spending rules for 2021, teams had to make decisions in July 2020, and inform the FIA of where they planned to change homologated components.
So, ahead of the July 22 deadline, Mercedes had made the decision to spend its chips on an updated nose, which it believed would improve the car’s aerodynamics.
However, following the tire failures at the British Grand Prix in August, the FIA wrote to the teams after the race to inform them that they wanted to step up the aerodynamic regulation changes for 2021 and further cut the downforce. This included further restrictions on the dimensions of the floor, as well as modifications to the lower bargeboard area, which would particularly disadvantage Mercedes.
Knowing what the changes entailed, and how it would affect low- rake cars more than high- rake models, the solution Mercedes chose was to modify its gearbox to help raise the rear suspension height and overcome difficulties.
However, this was not possible because homologation restrictions had already forced teams to commit to any gearbox changes just five days after the end of the last race in June, so it was too late to go that route. .
Mercedes instead was tied to its original plan to spend tokens on its nose , which it had bet on when it didn’t know the full implications of the 2021 rule changes.
However, his idea for the nose ultimately changed when the consequences of the rule changes became clear during a particularly difficult pre-season testing programme.
Elliott confirmed that it was the general loss of downforce, rather than any particular balance issues with the car, that became the main concern during the opening races of 2021.
“I think when you have a car that is dominant, which is what we’ve had before, the balance that you have is not something that matters much to the drivers,” Elliott added.
“So I don’t think the problem we had at the beginning of the season was so much balance, I think we just lost a lot of aerodynamic performance.
“If that affected us as much as the others, it’s impossible to judge because we don’t know what the impact was on the other cars.
“All we know is that when we did our work over the winter and showed up on the circuit, the advantage that we had in the (2020) season, the one that we had achieved in the middle of that year, was gone.
Aware of the work required to recover, with restricted time in the wind tunnel and a cost cap, Mercedes decided it was better to focus its efforts for 2021 on a package to overcome the downforce losses caused by the new rules rather than continue with the new nose.
That decision meant plans for this piece were shelved, so Mercedes never got around to getting it up and running or spending its tokens .
Despite the difficulties the team faced, Mercedes bounced back to secure the constructors’ championship in the final race of the season, but Lewis Hamilton lost the drivers’ crown to Max Verstappen in Abu Dhabi.
