The last three years I have explained the new
car and the changes that we have made to it, always with last year's car nearby and I
could jump between the two cars pointing out the differences one to the other
but this year here I am with the W12 all alone. To understand why I am
standing with just one car this year, you have to go back to the spring of last year
when COVID started to overtake our season. After Melbourne was cancelled, the first race of
the year and it was clear that the whole sport was going to be significantly affected by COVID-19,
the sport met to try and map out its future in what was obviously going to be a difficult
year and we took a few very sensible decisions. We could see even then that it wasn’t
just 2020 that was going to be affected and that COVID was going to cast a very long
shadow over the season to follow as well. And the sport made a series of quite sensible
decisions to try to survive in this new world affected by this disease. And the
decision they took that was most striking was that we would carry over parts of the car
from one year to the next. So that the backbone, the underlying structure of the car would be
the same between the 2020 season and the 2021. So, with this W12 in front of me here today bits
of it are achingly familiar. The survival cell where the driver sits, that's the same piece.
The transmission at the back, the fuel system, the hydraulic system, many, many, many of the
components on the car are simply cut and paste from last year to this. And not only are they cut
and paste in a design sense, the actual physical parts, this survival cell is the very thing that
raced last year on our 2020 design, hence no 2020 car behind me, because those 2020 cars have
actually been transformed into these 2021 cars. Now, although there are lots of bits of the 2020
car in this design, that doesn’t mean in any way it is the same car. Sure, the architecture,
the underlying structure is the same, but many of the things that make it a
performance car have changed and that's because the sport also decided to keep the
things that tend to distinguish cars from one another in performance terms, keep those on
the table. So, all of the aerodynamic package, that's new. All of the engine, that's new. The
cooling system beneath the skin here, that's new as well. These are the sort of things that
make the main differences between the cars and so although we have had the good fortune of being
able in this difficult year, where our work has been so affected by COVID, to be able big lumps
of the car forward from one year to the next, we still have the main challenge of designing a
fast car all over again, completely fresh and new. Not only have all those opportunities
for performance been left on the table, but they have been done so in an environment
where the rules have been changing very fast as well. In the previous season in 2020, we saw
that the cars were starting to get a little bit too fast for the tracks and a little bit too
fast for the tyres, and so it was important just to bring the performance back a little bit.
So, the sport met again and decided to change the aerodynamics on the car to slow them down. So,
on the back of the car on the floor the rules were changed quite a lot. It doesn’t look like
much when you see the changes in geometry terms, look at the car, it won't look so different but
actually from an aerodynamicist's point of view the changes at the back of the car here in front
of the rear wheels and the diffuser behind and the forward part of the floor just down there those
changes are actually very, very big and from an aerodynamicist's point of view they represent a
sort of regulatory vandalism that actually knocked the performance of the car right back about a
year and a half to somewhere around 2019 levels. Of course, we don't want to leave the performance
at 2019 levels. The regulators didn’t expect them to stay at 2019 levels, they expected us to do our
job which is to scrabble our way back forwards by working in the wind tunnel and trying to find that
performance back again onto the car. And we had a very exciting time in the
wind tunnel doing just that, finding new ways to make sure that even with
the floor chopped and hacked by regulation we were able to put a car down on
the track that has high performance. In the middle of the car here, the Power
Unit, I said that was all new and it is, every little bit of it is new. And it's probably
most obvious to an external observer in that big bulge that you see there. There has been
a big investment by our friends at HPP, our teammates at HPP, to redesign the
plenum, the intake system of the engine, retune the engine around that and
squeeze a lot more horsepower out of the Power Unit as a consequence. But they had
to do that in a very interesting regulatory environment where they only get one shot at it.
In previous years they were allowed three goes, you had a phase 1 PU, a phase 2 and a phase 3 each
brought at different parts of the season with the Power Unit getting stronger through the year. In
this year's rules they get one go and they have to make sure they get all of that goodness into
the Power Unit right from the start of the year. Another big change to the rules for 2021 is
that we have new tyres. The tyres last year as I mentioned earlier, they were starting to get a bit
on the limit for the performance of the cars and these new tyres for 2021 have been reengineered to
give more durability and more margin for the cars. We saw the performance of these tyres in two
little glimpses last year. We were allowed to try them out in a couple of free practice sessions
and we could see from those two glimpses that they have a significant effect on the handling of the
car and on the performance of the car and it will be really crucial in just the three days of winter
testing that we get at the start of this year to really understand what makes these tyres work
because the glimpses last year gave us a sense of what they want but the fine tuning of that really
figuring out where their operating point is, is going to make a big difference to the
competitiveness of the overall package. So, standing before this W12 it's a strange
feeling, bits of me are thinking 'well it's an old friend, this looks very familiar' but actually
that's not how I feel overall. I don’t feel like this is something that you can just put on like
an old coat or pick up like an old friendship and just make it all happen like you did the year
before. It feels very much like it should do at the start of a year, it feels like the beginning
of a new relationship where you are excited, you are hopeful but you are also a bit frightened
that you might say or do the wrong thing and where you know it is important that you don’t. So this car in front of us we hope that in the
winter testing we will do all the right things to get the best from it and to build that
relationship so that over the course of the season she will eventually prove to be as good
a friend to us as her predecessor was in 2020.
The fact that they don't have a working W11 anymore is sad. That car will be remembered as one of the best ever.
Petition for James Allison to narrate some F1 audiobooks
‘regulatory vandalism’
Such a great play on words
I always love this video every year, it’s definitely the most detail any team provides about their new car.
I look forward to the race in two weeks!
It's finally time... for James Allison's new car explainer! We hope you enjoy this year's piece, which we've done a little differently this time... 😜👀
Interesting he said one of their big focuses of testing was the new tyres. Could that explain why Lewis and Valtteri were abusing them so hard during the low fuel runs?
Its amazing to hear this from James we need a good AMA session with him on here eventually!
I see a James Allison video and I click play instantly.
Edit- I can’t believe they don’t have a physical W11 anymore, cmon guys that car was legendary and probably the fastest F1 car ever! Pls have a rolling chassis at least!
The part that still intrigues me about the W12 is what Mercedes have actually spent their development tokens on
The team haven’t come out and said it, and there aren’t any significant visual cues on what they’ve spent them on - the front nose, suspension, rear suspension etc. all look remarkably similar to the W11
But when someone asked this question on the YouTube video, the Mercedes Admin replied saying “That will become clear in time”
I know it’s astoundingly daft, but I am starting to subscribe to the theory that Mercedes are going to have a bunch of new parts for tomorrow’s filming day. To me, it’s the only way their token spend can make sense.