Mercedes technical director Mike Elliott says the 2022 cars will have the pace of last season’s F1 cars as Formula One constructor’s Champions Mercedes-Benz AMG F1 teased fans with what is assumed to be their 2022 challenger; the car that Lewis Hamilton and George Russell will fight for the Formula 1 title this season.

TJ13 has acquired an enhanced version of that image to help fans glimpse at the W13 might look like just before the official launch happens later this month. The car looks remarkably similar to concept renders this website published, designed by Industrial designer Olcay Tuncay.

Formula One has revised its technical regulations in the lead up to the 2022 campaign with the aim of allowing the cars to produce closer and more exciting races through the reduction of dirty air and the return of ground effect.

Despite the expectation that the 2022 season’s cars would be slower than last season’s, Mercedes has suggested that this will not be the case.

“The performance of the new cars will probably not be that different from the old ones,” said Mike Elliott.

“Obviously the intention of these regulations was to try and improve overtaking. It will be a little while before we can see if that has actually happened. The cars are a bit heavier, the E10 fuel pack will work slightly differently, the way the aerodynamics work and the set-up that goes with it will also be different.”

“Until we get the best out of it and develop that through testing and the first few races we won’t really know, but overall I suspect the performance will be relatively similar to last year.”

“When you get a new set of regulations, it’s a new challenge to start from scratch. Most years, when you have deferred regulations, you have a pretty good idea of what the ‘good’ looks like. You know what kind of gains you need to make from the previous year’s car and you can kind of work on a fine-tuning direction and find all those extra gains.”

“When you have a whole new set of regulations, you don’t know what the limit is, you don’t know where you can go, and that’s exciting for the engineers – to explore that and do it in a better way than the competition. In a normal year you have a pretty good idea of what you need to find over the winter, but with the brand new regulations, who knows what’s going to happen or what the competition will have brought?”

Enhanced image of the W13?

The Mercedes team will present its car for the 2022 season on February 18th at an event broadcast live from the Silverstone track in the UK.