The drastic upgrades by Mercedes, RedBull and Ferrari for the 2022 F1 season

In the dynamic of F1, staying one step ahead of the competition is not exactly enough. In a sport where every tenth of a second matters, every gram is shaved off and every imperfection cleared, gaining a competitive edge on your rivals at a time when the field is getting more bunched up than ever is beyond vital. Especially if you want to win! And that’s exactly what last year’s top 3 teams, i.e. Mercedes, Red Bull and Ferrari have done.

These changes may or may not result in them gaining a competitive advantage, but we can speculate on what their pace might be. For the truth, you have to wait six more days when the first quali run is scheduled to take place in Bahrain next Saturday. With that in mind, let’s look at each team’s changes in a bit more detail!

Mercedes

Mercedes’ change was so obvious, it shocked and stunned the entire paddock! It’s one thing to redesign the sidepod or change the placement of a few aspects, but to almost completely eliminate the sidepod to make the sides of the car appear as minimal as possible is an extreme only Merc can go to. This was done to make it more aerodynamically efficient than they were before. The car concept is radically different to the one they ran in Barcelona testing. But, that’s obvious right? Here’s what you don’t know.

The new design makes the car dart onwards and cut through the air with ease, not being affected much by the air resistance usually offered up by a large margin. Their aim was to reduce drag, and these will certainly do so as without an extra bit of the car jutting out and hitting the air, the less the chances of the car being affected by drag produced at high speeds!

Observe more closely and you’d notice that the portion in front of the driver has been changed drastically while everything else remains the same. The new sidepods aren’t the only change. The new carbon inlets, a smooth and straight floor design along with newly placed canards have also come up. The wing mirrors now stand on multiple pillars. This W13 could literally allow air to slip through from the sides.

The new sort of triangular sidepod housing is NOT a zero pod as people are saying. It offers almost the same area of inlet as the one before just that it is a vertical sidepod wide at the bottom and extremely narrow at the top. The triangular design helps with the radiator in a similar fashion to ‘normal’ sidepods and we aren’t even sure if the radiators on the inside have changed at all. Below that it all flows down wide and outward leading to the coke bottle area.

The car always had a wide floor channel (outer). The change brought in now gives it an entry point that is wide enough to create positive pressure while the suction under the floor combines with this positive pressure to create downforce. If you thought the Merc was really fast in the slower corners, now you know why! The venturi inlets i.e. the leading edge of the floor has this new housing right where the inlets turn downwards. The pressure we discussed above will lead to much more aggressive airflow in here which will in turn mean even more downforce. The changes to the floor are such that there is no more of working around vortex aggressively as it was before with the wavy floor. The new single curl on the arrow straight floor creates vortices to channel even more energy on the venturi inlets.

However, to just say that this is the correct concept for the car would be easy but that’s not the case at all, for if this was the way to go why wouldn’t have other teams also conjured up similar sidepod concepts wherein the sidepod is almost eliminated entirely? Mercedes are very much struggling with porpoising and stability and rest assured, no team would purposefully depict a worse car on the last day of testing. Mercedes has taken a bold decision, and the question of whether it will be successful will only be answered in a week’s time in Bahrain!

Red Bull

The team from Milton Keynes in the UK have brought a new sidepod philosophy to the track, with them running it on the final day of testing as well. What they have done in simple terms is made the sidepod slimmer by tweaking its design in a way such that the air flowing will now be accelerated even further, taking air to the underbody of the car even quicker!

This will generate more downforce, and to achieve this the team have also redesigned their floor concept which will certainly help turn and rotate the car and make it easier for the drivers as well. It did help them at least on paper, with both Sergio and Max topping the morning and afternoon sessions on Day 3 of Bahrain testing respectively!

All in all, imagine a tricep cut on your arm muscles. That is exactly what RedBull have given to their bodywork on the sides. There isn’t much detail about the venturi inlets it is safe to say that the treatment of the vanes will be slightly different to better meet the new contouring behind it. There is a new outer floor, with a very aggressive and accentuated vortex generator which should further energise the flow through the venturis. It is very unlike and mostly opposite to the Mercedes. Mercedes completely went to another direction with their sidepods and non-accentuated vortices on the floor while RedBull sticks to 2022’s conventional styling. Given RedBull have Adrian Newey behind this design, it is mostly certain that this new RB18 is being checked out at the Mercedes HQ.

Will Red Bull’s skinnier sidepods take the cake or will they be unsuccessful in what they set out to achieve? A new chassis and floor concept is a bold route to go down this close to the start of the season, though Red Bull have never been ones to back out from taking bold strategies with their car’s design, for after all they have design legend Adrian Newey at the helm of car development!

Ferrari

Ferrari brought in a new base setup with a new floor that will allow them to take control of porpoising. The team from Maranello have been showing great pace all throughout testing, and this has just further boosted their chances to be even quicker. For all the tifosi out there, I am not trying to give you hope. I am saying Ferrari has the most steady and calm hand right now and are looking to be VERY impressive in the first race. Their development curve though, will not be as dramatic through out the season as the others like Mercedes and RedBull.

The new floor on the Ferrari has a clear cut at the rear giving much greater stability to the floor at higher speeds and further mitigating the phenomenon of porpoising. Though, this new floor creates a new oversteer problem. Not as much of a problem though as it can allow for softer setups now. This will allow them longer term advantage over the course of a race with slower laps. If you saw the pre-season test closely, the F1-75 looked the most stable, extremely glued to the ground and its drivers quite confident.

In fact, someone from Ferrari stated that Ferrari had already tried out the Mercedes concept before! This could either turn in Ferrari’s favour extremely or just the downfall of the century. I wonder though if Ferrari had tried this then why was Mattia thinking it would be against the “spirit of regulations.” Maybe Ferrari tried the concept, it was fast and they thought it won’t be allowed? This season gets as interesting as it can. From the looks of the F1-75 though, it appears that Ferrari are ready for a championship fight. Let’s hope it is the case.