The radical Mercedes car concept which ruined F1 title chances

F1 2026 pre-season testing is well underway, with the first three-day testing event in Bahrain having concluded as all of the teams performed pretty well reliability-wise.

But as with every season, there are certain teams who have caught the eye simply for their 'radical' car designs this week, including Audi with their massive sidepods compared to their rivals, and Adrian Newey's AMR26 design.

These teams may be the talk of the paddock, but they don't need to be reminded that radical and different is not always good.

Current 2026 favourites Mercedes will tell them that, following their 2022 shocker which completely ruined their title chances for that year.

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Mercedes' radical 2022 car design

Following eight consecutive constructors' championship title wins, no one really wanted to suggest that Mercedes' dominance over the F1 grid was finally yielding, despite the fact that Lewis Hamilton had suffered a crushing defeat to Max Verstappen in the 2021 drivers' championship race.

The vibe around Mercedes was very much business as usual, despite what had happened in Abu Dhabi just a few months previous.

Mercedes still had the most successful racer of all time in one of their cars, and had supplemented him with a young, British racer in George Russell, who had replaced Valtteri Bottas ahead of the season.

The 2022 season was seeing new regulations as the ground effect era swept into the sport, and it was crucial that Mercedes got their heads down and tried to remain the team to beat in 2022 and beyond.

The race was on between them and the Newey-inspired Red Bull team to find the answer to the new regulations.

And Mercedes thought they had done just that, turning heads in the paddock with their radical 'zeropods' design, with their car looking visibly different to most of their rivals.

The general feeling was 'here we go again' following eight consecutive Mercedes constructors' titles, but it didn't pan out quite like that.

Why were Mercedes so slow in 2022?

Mercedes' 2022 'zeropod' car design that they brought to pre-season testing in Bahrain was designed to expose more of the floor on the car, supposedly maximising downforce with the new ground effect cars.

There's no doubt that the Mercedes did look more streamlined than most of its rivals, and their previous ingenuity fooled the paddock into thinking that they had once again found something that everybody would be trying to copy within a few weeks.

All apart from Aston Martin's Sebastian Vettel, who hilariously mocked Mercedes' car on the grid, as seen in season five of Drive to Survive, with Russell exclaiming "Don't look at me, I didn't design it!"

The car suffered with awful porpoising - even more so than the other teams who had also struggled with this to some extent - and the zeropods design was clearly causing performance issues too, with Hamilton's podium at the season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix earned thanks to Verstappen and Sergio Perez's inability to finish the race, rather than through Mercedes' pace.

And so it would turn out. Hamilton didn't pick up another podium until eight races later at the Canadian Grand Prix. Not exactly ideal for somebody desperately trying to win an eighth world title.

As performance converged towards the end of the season and the team produced upgrades for the W13, Mercedes did manage to pick up a few more podiums as well as a race win through Russell at the Brazilian GP, and that was enough for them to finish third in the constructors' championship.

But this radical car concept was eventually scrapped ahead of the 2023 Monaco GP, with it also not yielding better results for them in the early part of the 2023 season, and they went down a more conventional route for the rest of the ground effect era.

So, Newey, Aston Martin and Audi beware. Getting it wrong now could cause over a year of pain, and as F1 heralds in one of its biggest regulation overhauls ever, sometimes yielding to a less radical aerodynamic design can be the sensible option.

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