Mercedes Technical Director Mike Elliott has explained how the team are expecting their 2022 car to perform in comparison to last year's challenger. With a wave of new technical regulations being introduced into the sport, the cars will look different as well as potentially finding it easier to follow one another, and as such the aim is to create closer racing. Elliott, though, is anticipating that the performance of this year's W13 may not be that different to the previous incarnation. "The overall performance of the new cars is probably not going to be very different from the old," Elliott said in the second part of Mercedes' 'Road to 2022' explainer videos. "Obviously, the intention of these regulations was to try and improve overtaking, and it will be a little bit of time before we can see whether that's actually happened. "The cars are a bit heavier, the power unit on the E10 fuel is going to perform slightly differently, and the way the aerodynamics are going to work, and the set-up of the car that goes with it as well, will be different as well."
When will the car's true performance become clear?
Elliott believes that the true performance of the 2022 cars may not become clear until some way into the season, but still feels that there will not be a drastic change from 2021. "Until we get the best out of that, until we've developed that through testing and through the first few races, we're not really going to know," he explained. "But overall, I suspect that the performance will be relatively similar to last year." Mercedes are set to launch the W13 on 18 February, and the car will not be the only thing that looks different, with the team also fielding their first new driver line-up since 2017. George Russell joins seven-time World Champion Lewis Hamilton following the departure of Valtteri Bottas to Alfa Romeo.
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