Mercedes technical director Mike Elliott believes there will be little performance difference between this year's cars and last season's machines, although they will look very different.
F1 teams are facing a regulation reset this season, the first significant revamp of the rule book since 2009, with a radical design philosophy focused on ground effects having guided engineers.
The new rules have been conceived and written with the aim of allowing cars to follow each other more closely by significantly reducing the amount of turbulent air rushing off a car's rear wing which in turn should help boost overtaking opportunities for drivers.
Whether the aerodynamic changes prove efficient in improving the show on the track, only time will tell. But Nikolas Tombazis, the FIA's head of single-seater matters has projected a half a second increase in lap time for this year's contenders.
But Elliott sees the performance of F1's new-spec cars as being "relatively similar" to their predecessors.
"The overall performance of the new cars is probably not going to be very different from the old," Elliott said in a special video released by Mercedes on its YouTube channel.
"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 car is 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 will be different as well.
"Until we get the best out of that, until we've developed that through testing and the first few races, we're not really going to know.
"But overall, I suspect the performance will be relatively similar to last year."
©Mercedes
However, one area where Elliott sees F1's latest generation machines being markedly different is their aesthetics, and predictably so given the regulations' aero changes.
"The new car looks completely different to last year's, and that's just a consequence of the regulations," Elliott explained. "They're a very much different shape.
"The sort of complexity that we used to have around the barge-board area is gone and the differences between the cars is going to be more in the surface shapes.
"As a result, all of this year's cars will look fairly similar and have similar shapes, and the differences will all be subtle, changes in aerodynamic shapes and surfaces that we've got, particularly under the car.
"I think the most visible difference will be in the aerodynamic shape of the car. Not only are the aerodynamics different, but the whole way the regulations are constructed are completely different.
"In the past, we've just had to fill boxes or shadow certain planes, but in this set of regulations, we're given a sort of base surface that we've got to work to, and we have to stick within a certain tolerance of it, so that's a completely different way of working for us."
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