The W12 must become the new showpiece of Mercedes. We zoom in on the new car from Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas.
Let’s start with the color scheme of the car. This of course has no influence on the performance, but has been refreshed for 2021. The black of last year has largely remained, but the green and red accents of two main sponsors are clearly present. You also cannot ignore the fact that AMG is in the team name. These three letters appear several times on the hood. The red star in memory of Niki Lauda is still there, but on the W12 it is located directly behind the cockpit, below the red part.
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Now let’s move on to the things that do affect the car’s performance. If we look at the front of the Mercedes W12, little seems to have changed at first glance. The front wing is almost the same as the one we saw last year, but that does not mean that it will soon be the same in Bahrain.
What is striking are the so-called turning vanes under the car. These aim to send the air under the Mercedes car as efficiently as possible. These are new compared to last year.
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If we look at the side of the car, we see that Mercedes has also taken care of the bargeboards. With the Asterix wings, Mercedes clings to the horizontal slats and there is a flat horizontal beam that extends to the edge of the cockpit.
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The thing that stood out most during the launch was the bodywork of the Mercedes W12 at the rear. The new car of Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas has been given a new engine, which turns out to be so different that changes had to be made to the hood.
There is clearly a bump on the hood, which does not seem very aerodynamically favorable. Because the new Mercedes engine needed a little more space at that location to squeeze out all the extra horsepower. In the other places around the hood, however, the W12 seems a bit slimmer than its predecessor, so Mercedes will have made some progress there too.
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As for the floor, Mercedes was hugely mysterious. Fearing that the competition would immediately rush to the wind tunnel with the ideas of the Brackley team, nothing was shown of the new floor. The rules have been significantly amended in this area, to ensure that the cars generate less downforce in this way.
Mercedes hopes to have largely regained that downforce with its new innovations, in which the new floor must play a major role. That is why almost nothing is shown of the chassis of the W12.
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Mercedes is also very vague at the back of the photo. The diffuser, just like the floor, an area that had to be changed this year, is not shown. Incidentally, Mercedes is not the only team to hide that part. Red Bull, which in any case showed little or nothing of the new RB16B, also leaves the competition guessing about its diffuser.
At first glance, the Mercedes rear suspension may also appear to have changed, but that will become clear during the test days in Bahrain.
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