After rip-roaring their way to an emphatic ninth Constructor’s crown in the 2020 F1 season, Mercedes have launched their 2021 challenger, the W12 with a straightforward aim: to stand head and shoulders above the rest in a brand new season.
With determination, supreme form and the quintessential resilience, factors that have made them the team to beat, Mercedes will repose big expectations with the W12.
The team’s hopes to gather yet another team and driver’s title this season shall be sky high, akin to the best driver on the grid, Lewis Hamilton.
The 2021 world-beater?
What helps them, of course, is a history of utter consistency, the team demolishing nine other rivals and nineteen drivers successively since 2014 on their way to raising the bar of Formula 1. Not to forget, in the process of achieving mega wins, Mercedes have truly rewritten F1 record books creating an aura of sheer dominance much like the team they successively countered and defeated fair and square- Ferrari.
A launch that was hugely-anticipated much like the impending Scuderia launch, the W12 cut a figure of elegance with the typical black and green livery punctuated with spurts of red and grey making for an enticing new look.
Technically, the W12 is an upgrade of last season’s championship-winning car, a machine that emerged supreme in the end winning thirteen in seventeen rounds.
A team that has singularly etched a new history of sorts in the turbo-hybrid era of Formula 1, Mercedes’ W12 will be expected to create a louder roar this season.
Big hopes tied to the W12
In what can clearly be called a rigorous new season, replete with 23 races, the most ever in the turbo-hybrid era of the sport, Mercedes will be aiming to edge out teams that are driven to raise their game given new updates and newfound rigour: think McLaren, picture Red Bull.
To quote the BBC on the aerodynamic functioning of the car, it’s worthwhile to note:
Aerodynamic changes are unlimited and Allison said this had been “the normal fare of seeking out opportunity across every square centimeter of the car with particular attention to finding places where we can invest extra weight into fancier aerodynamic geometry”.
This was a focus because the rules demand F1 cars are 6kg heavier this season, and Mercedes has also saved some weight because its revolutionary dual-axis steering system has been banned for 2021.
The power-unit, such a massive component of the lean and clean killing machine the team has successfully gone onto produce all these years has factored in the the fundamentals of high-performance and reliability, able determiners of the team’s massive success.
Tied to the W12 are, of course, big hopes.
Can this be the machine with which seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton will edge past Michael Schumacher to take a sensational eighth crown?
Should he do so, he’ll be the most successful driver in the seven-decade history of the fastest form of motor-racing on the planet.
Meanwhile, title-rival Finnish Valtteri Bottas, still searching for that elusive world championship, will ride high on the power and gravitas the W12 promises.
So while it has ticked all the right boxes for now, one can only spot the first signs of the W12’s prowess when it hits the pre-season testing due to begin from March 12-to-14, 2021.
Will it be Merc and Hammer-time once again?