Take a look on Aston Martin. I think nothing more has to be said.Ryar wrote: ↑21 Dec 2021, 12:20https://nl.motorsport.com/f1/news/onthu ... 1/6943715/
There was one point that was debated hard during the year was, the aero changes were "targeted" towards Mercedes and it was "known" that the changes would hit Mercedes.
Elliot then said that it was a general loss of downforce and not a specific balance problem, which Mercedes feared during the first test. "I think with a dominant car, like we had before, the balance for the drivers didn't really matter," said Elliot. "That's why I think it wasn't really a balance problem, but more of an overall aerodynamic loss. However, it's impossible to say if it hit us as hard as the other teams. We don't know what the impact was on other cars. After we finished our work in the winter and the car went onto the track during the tests, we discovered that the lead [of 2020] had disappeared."
Elliott essentially says, they didn't know who would be hit hard. That clears the first point that people debated, that "it was known" that it would hit the low rake cars. Mercedes technical director says, they didn't know who would be hit hard. As Mercedes proved thorugh the season, once they started developing the car in the right direction, the car was moving forward in performance, which shows, it wasn't as much the "low rake cars were hit hard".
It's probably safe to assume, Mercedes either started development work of W12 in different a direction while the full scale of changes for 2021 were not yet published and then had to abort it to move in a different direction. The other aspect probably was, they would have thought they had enough in hand from the W11 car and were confident of W12 carrying over a lot of that, which proved otherwise in testing. As the season showed, they could develop the W12 to overcome the deficit they had in the beginning, which shows, it wasn't so much "low rake" cars were affected. In the hindsight, if Mercedes would have got their decision making right in terms of developing directions for the car, W12 would probably have been every bit as dominant as W11 was.