27/10/2022
NEWS STORY
A week later than originally planned, Mercedes intends using its controversial new front wing in Mexico this weekend.
The wing forms part of what is the German team's final upgrade package of the season, before attention - and funding - switches to 2023.
However, amidst doubts of its legality, not to mention the lack of a second version so that both drivers could run it, meant that the wing was put on hold last weekend.
"Personally, I think we could argue them," said the team's technical director, Mike Elliot in Austin, in terms of the wing's legality. "But the question becomes whether we want to or not.
"The gain for those bits is so small, is it worth the risk of falling foul of the stewards?" he added.
The question of legality centres on the upper flaps on the wing which feature a series of 'fasteners', which Elliott argued were for the purposes of holding the wing planes together. Rival teams weren't convinced, arguing that the fasteners are for an aerodynamic advantage.
In the post-race video debrief, trackside engineering director, Andrew Shovlin claims that the reason for not running the wing at COTA was more about the fact that there was only one.
"The reason we didn't run it in Austin was that we only had one of those parts," he insists. "So, if we damaged it during qualifying it would have meant the car that damaged the wing had to start from the back.
"Also with a very busy programme - we had the tyre test in FP2 - we didn't actually have time to evaluate.
"We have more of those parts available in Mexico, we will run that on the Friday," he confirmed, "we'll check it's all working as expected, and the plan at this stage is to race that wing.
"That is our last major update but there are always a string of new parts, smaller parts, that we are looking at," he added. "Either to get a small gain in performance, or at a lot of it as this stage of the year though is learning for next year, so some of those test parts are really just trying to understand some of the development direction we want to go in.
"So like I said, it's the last major update, but it won't be the last change to the car."