Mercedes have a warning for Formula 1 that the “earthquake” changes coming for 2022 only motivate the team to want to stay in front.
After seven straight double championships since the hybrid era began in 2014, and few betting against an eighth this year, the Brackley-based squad is facing the biggest threat to their reign of dominance next season as F1 undergoes a radical overhaul.
In 2021, a first-ever budget cap of $145m is being introduced to bring greater financial equality to the grid, and that will be followed by all-new cars in 2022, which have been designed to promote closer racing.
But, looking forward to the year ahead, Mercedes boss Toto Wolff declared his team ready for the hurdles to their continued success.
“For us, it will be an interesting year [2021] because we need to structure ourselves in a different way than we have done before due to the cost cap,” he told Motorsport.com.
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“We are facing this formidable challenge of slightly tweaked 2021 regulations and a big earthquake of regulatory change for 2022.
“There are factors working against us that motivate us a lot and factors working for us because we believe we have a good organisation.
“But overall, we embrace change and we’ve always done so in the past. So the organisation is very much looking forward into 2022.”
But while the aim of the rule changes is to close the grid up, Mercedes technical chief James Allison says it may only prolong the German manufacturer’s dominance.
“You have unintended consequences with many things and if you are sitting, as we are, happily at the top of the pyramid right now but not in any way feeling like you are securely placed there, then a lot of those changes do look like they are targeted at us,” he told ESPN.
“They’re not, they don’t have Mercedes written on them, but they have, at their heart, the idea that they don’t want a pyramid, they want a continuous churn of teams that are capable of winning one day and not winning the next, and for each weekend to be unpredictable.
“The potential unintended consequence of that is that if you are seven years into a winning streak and find it difficult to come up with fresh rhetoric that gets people stirred up for the challenge of an eighth or a ninth, then in many ways the sport does you quite a big favour by coming up with a set of rules that are aimed squarely at your heart.
“There is nothing more motivating for this group of people than to set to this new challenge and go, ‘We’ll show you! We’ll show you that we will not go quietly into the night!’
“That’s the thrill for us now, to take this regulatory challenge and, as we have done with previous ones, try to show afresh what we are made of and that we are a team that just wants to try to do the best it possibly can.
“With luck, that best is good enough to be at the front.”