Can Mercedes' W12 retain the team's crown?

The king is dead, long live the king. Mercedes' W11, having exited stage left with the title of Formula 1's fastest car draped around its shoulders, is no more. In its place the title-hoarding Brackley squad has unveiled its W12, 2021's car to beat.

With the prestige of streaking to seven successive drivers' and constructors' titles comes the obvious question: will this train ever slow down? Of course, the sword of Damocles threatens to dangle above the team's dominance once the year clicks over to 2022 - but in the meantime, the continuation of the 2020 cars suggests that Mercedes should be able to continue its run of form into this season. Unless, of course, Red Bull is hiding something very special...

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Mercedes pressed pause on its 2020 development early to steal a march on 2021, but it seems that the team is trying to keep a lid on any updates for the time being. The launch renders exhibit the new livery, featuring silver flashes on the retained black livery, along with a plethora of AMG logos on the rear portion of the car. INEOS has also expanded its influence on the livery, the car featuring a smidgen more red.

Apart from that, there's few changes to the W11 package in render form. At the front, the car retains the split-end front wing element that the team has used in the past couple of seasons, shortening the length of the top element to satisfy the five-element regulation mandated by the rules.

That said, Mercedes made sporadic appearances with a more conventional front wing design at select events last year, so this can be generally interchangeable. How that plays with the new floor regulations is currently unknown, but it's not outside the bounds of possibility that there will be changes between now and the trip to Bahrain. As much as this writer would love to complain about teams not showing their full hand during launch season, he has done so already...

The car also retains the slender nose structure that it arguably pioneered under this ruleset, and the front brake ducts also appear to have been flipped upside down, with the widest part of the inlet now having dropped to the bottom. Presumably there's more to be gained aerodynamically by doing so, and more opportunity to turn airflow towards the wake of the front wheels to push it outwards.

Furthermore, the W12 is also DAS-less. The toe-change device controversially added to the W11 has now been removed, meaning the team has to get on top of warming its front tyres in a more traditional manner. DAS had helped the team enjoy monstrous form in qualifying and on race restarts with improved warmth in the tyres - so the team will have to recoup that passively.

The bargeboards also feature a few differences in structure over last season. The leading edge, where the 'F1 W12' logotype features, appears to have been shuffled further forwards, and has grown slightly taller to interact with the small fin set back behind the top wishbone. This fin had also appeared on the car occasionally throughout 2020, and perhaps the reconfigured bargeboards have necessitated its return to ensure everything links up properly.

"We have spent our tokens, but we won't reveal how we used them just yet. That'll become clear in good time" James Allison

Last year, the bargeboards underwent a mid-season change, where the front part of the bargeboard was moved back from the Belgian Grand Prix and beyond - so perhaps the team has seen fit to reverse that shift in position owing to the demands of the new floor regulations. The horizontal 'boomerang' features a slightly upturned tip too, allowing for a different placement of any vortex generated and, behind that, the turning vane attached directly to the sidepod now extends all the way to the floor.

Unsurprisingly, that new floor has been kept relatively hidden. It does seem to feature a small rise in the rear corner, as many of the other launched cars have done, but further changes have been kept in the dark. It seems that Mercedes has also opted to tighten up its bodywork, with a large bulge featuring in the middle of the engine cover. The implication here is that some of the internal components around the powertrain required more clearance to the bodywork, so could not be shrink-wrapped to quite the same extent as the rest.

The rear wing appears in much the same shape as it ran in the latter half of 2020 - albeit with the double-mount geometry, rather than the single-mount design it tends to use at circuits where higher straight-line speed is expected. The upper element also appears in the same specification that Mercedes used at circuits like Silverstone last year, with a straightened leading edge. On other circuits, such as the 2020 climax at Abu Dhabi, it extruded the outer edges forward and also did the same at the centrepoint to match the V-shape in the trailing edge. That V-shaped cutout usually helps to bleed off any turbulence produced by the DRS housing, ensuring that the wing retains its efficiency.

Mercedes declined to divulge where it had used its two allowable development tokens - permitted for a range of structural areas on the car to keep development costs down - just yet, so the team clearly has something else up its sleeve.

"There are some parts of the car that you can change token-free, for example the power unit, the cooling systems, the suspension and of course all of the aerodynamic surfaces," said technical director James Allison. "We have spent our tokens, but we won't reveal how we used them just yet. That'll become clear in good time."

To extend its current advantage over the field, Mercedes' High Performance Powertrains division has once more developed a new power unit. A few weeks ago, new engine chief Hywel Thomas suggested that the team was facing a few teething problems with it although McLaren, having resubscribed to the Silver Arrows' powertrain delivery service, suggested that it hadn't encountered too many issues at this stage.

Regardless, Thomas explained that the new PU has some "innovative" new elements to it, ahead of the 2022 switch to E10 fuels which will require further developments to accommodate the biofuel element.

"We are going into the eighth season of pretty stable regulations, so we have a good understanding of the current hybrid engines," said Thomas.

"Our new product is a characteristic Mercedes-AMG power unit, but we've worked hard to take the next development step. Stable regulations mean that it's getting increasingly challenging to unlock additional performance, so you need a focused approach.

"We identified three main areas to work on: first, we've continued the development of the technology in the Power Unit. That's a continuous process, and we feel like we've been able to take a step forward on that front again this year. The second area is reliability. We discovered some design issues last year, so we've been looking at those and introduced some changes to address them.

"We've also got some completely new innovations that will be in the racing PU for the first time. That was particularly challenging because last season finished late, so the winter period has been shorter than normal and has given us less time to prepare, which put extra strain on the business."

Undoubtedly, there's more to come from Mercedes, and we await the reveal of the area in which the team has spent its tokens with bated breath. The team has also expanded its "Accelerate 25" project, in which it hopes to ensure that a minimum of 25% of its new employees factor from a minority background to provide greater representation. The team is also working with Lewis Hamilton, who only recently added another year to his stay at the team, on a new foundation to underline its service to global social issues.

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Of course, Mercedes will also operate under the $145m cost cap for the first time, shifting resources to a new applied science division to ensure its 1000-strong workforce remains in employment. The team now has to shrink its outlay on F1 considerably, and being thrifty with its spending is a new challenge it arguably hasn't faced since the Brawn GP days. It also has the least windtunnel time to work with too, adding a further challenge.

If seven years at the top is anything to go by, Mercedes will happily tuck into any challenge thrown its way. Although the W11 was one of F1's greatest machines, will the carryover translate into the updated regulations? It might not be as quick, but the W12 could be every bit as dominant.