© LAT Images for Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Ltd
Mercedes’ Chief Technical Officer James Allison says the team “had to reinvent the car tip to toe” and “everywhere you look it’s completely new”.
In Mercedes’ video preview of Formula 1’s 2022 rules, James Allison emphasized the enormity of the changes that have been introduced.
“We’ve been buried in them and the reality of making them real for so long that it’s easy to forget sometimes just what a massive set of regulation changes these 2022 rules represent,” Allison said.
“I’ve been working in the sport for over 30 years and they dwarf anything else I’ve ever seen.
“I suspect if I were to dig out Wikipedia and go through every season of the sport there has ever been there would be nothing to match the scale of the change that comes with 2022.
“The ruleset is not only enormous, the regulations are about twice the size of what’s preceded them, but they’re all almost entirely different to what came before them.
“That has meant we’ve had to reinvent the car tip to toe. Everywhere you look it’s completely new.”
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Allison goes on to say that Mercedes is actually excited by the challenge the new rules bring.
“When the regulations change in such large measure as these ones, then we approach that with all the fun and relish that that challenge deserves.
“Our job is to look for technical opportunity and regulations, and then use our combined wit and skill and all the effort that we make collectively, to try to find a configuration of car that will be better than anyone else’s approach to it.
“When everything is as new as this, then everywhere you look in that regulation set, [which is] twice as thick as the old one, there’s opportunity.
“There’s opportunity and, of course, there’s jeopardy, and we try to pick our way through the potential minefield and pick up all the little boxes of treasure that may be set in amongst the landmines, to end up with a car that we hope will see us pitching at the front of the grid,” the Briton concluded.
