Mercedes' secret floor design on its W12 that the team conveniently masked at the launch of its 2021 car was unveiled for all to see in Bahrain on Friday morning.
Although F1 teams have carried over their 2020 chassis, a tweaking of the technical rules has to changes to the cars' bargeboard and brake duct elements as well as to the floor, which now follows a more tapered outline.
But the all-important aero component has been trimmed and now stops 10 cm ahead of the rear tyre, while holes and slots are banned, with the end result producing an approximate 10 per cent drop in downforce.
At the car's launch, Mercedes technical director James Allison said the team was keeping its fllor design under wraps until the start of pre-season testing.
"The bit we are not showing you is down along the edges of the floor, that area is the area that was most affected by the regulations, where they tried to pull performance away from the car by changing the floor regs," he said.
"And down there, there is a bunch of aerodynamic detail that we are not quite ready to release to the world, not because it’s not there, but because we don’t want our competitors to see it, we don’t want them starting to try and put similar things in their wind tunnels.
"It just buys us a couple of weeks extra. We all look very closely at what our competitors do, so we know our competitors will be looking, and we don’t have to show it yet, so we’re not."
There's no doubt Mercedes' rivals will be peering over the Brackley squad's W12. The game is on!
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