© Wolfgang Wilhelm for Daimler AG
Technical Director James Allison says new Formula 1 rules seemingly aimed at stopping Mercedes, make the team go “we will not go quietly into the night”.
Formula 1 is introducing many new rules such as a budget cap, limited testing time based on previous year’s success, a plethora of new technical regulations from 2022 and more.
Many consider this an attempt to stop one team from dominating the sport long-term and in this case, that team is Mercedes. Technical Director James Allison doesn’t think it is a bad thing for Mercedes.
“You have unintended consequences with many things and if you are sitting, as we are, happily at the top of the pyramid right now,” the Briton told ESPN’s F1 podcast.
“But not in any way feeling like you are securely placed there and that you’ve got to keep scrabbling your way back up to that apex position — then a lot of those changes do look like they are targeted at us.
“They’re not — they don’t have Mercedes written on them — they have at their heart the idea that they don’t want a pyramid, they want a continuous churn of teams that are capable of winning one day and not winning the next, and for each weekend to be unpredictable.
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“But if you are in the position we are currently in, then it doesn’t feel that way, it feels like this is a set of rules that are designed to try to make sure a team like us can’t exist in the future.
“The potential unintended consequence of that is that if you are seven years into a winning streak and finding it difficult to come up with fresh rhetoric that gets people stirred up for the challenge of an eighth or a ninth, then in many ways the sport does you quite a big favour by coming up with a set of rules that are aimed squarely at your heart.
“There is nothing more motivating for this group of people than to set to this new challenge and go, ‘We’ll show you! We’ll show you that we will not go quietly into the night!’
“That’s the thrill for us now, to take this regulatory challenge and, as we have done with previous ones, try to show afresh what we are made of and that we are a team that just wants to try to do the best it possibly can.
“With luck, that best is good enough to be at the front,” concluded Allison.
