Mercedes challenged by limited wind tunnel time – Elliott

Mercedes says its approach to the design of its 2022 contender was made more difficult by F1's new rules but also by the management of its limited time in the wind tunnel.

Last year, Formula 1 implemented a sliding scale rule for aerodynamic testing that limited the number of wind tunnel runs and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) hours that teams may exploit.

Each team's allowance of wind tunnel and CFD testing is now defined by on-track performance as it's based on an outfit's championship position at the end of the previous season.

As the winner of the 2020 F1 Constructors' Championship, Mercedes was logically impacted by the rule which forced the Brackley squad to judiciously split its wind tunnel development hours between its 2021 and 2022 cars.

"The big challenge over the winter has been the fact we have less runs to use in the wind tunnel," explained Mercedes tech boss Mike Elliott in a video posted on the team's YouTube channel.

"So that has been challenging, trying to work out how much we should have spent on last year’s car versus how much we should have spent on this year’s car.

"This had knock-on consequences all the way through the factory," added Elliott.

"In terms of design work, we start design work earlier on things like gearboxes and chassis, particularly as the gearbox is fixed for a period of time. We have had to get that right."

• Read also: Mercedes sees performance of new cars 'relatively similar' to 2021

Despite the constraint and F1's new technical regulations, Mercedes did not change its approach to the design and production of its 2022 car, but the latter were made more difficult.

"Once we then begin to understand how the aerodynamics are going to look and how that's going to knock on to the rest of the car, we then get into sort of the detailed design work and that's been huge over the winter," said Elliott.

"So this sort of approach we take is the same we take every year. It’s just more difficult because the rule changes are much more significant than we have seen in the past."

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