(Motorsports news) Rivals are wondering if they, too, need to make a radical change of course after seeing the enormous strides that McLaren has achieved with its Austrian/British GP package, which was inspired by both Red Bull and Aston Martin sidepod ideas. 

And although Mercedes has long maintained that improvements to the sidepod and bodywork are not a fundamental performance differential, competitors are unmistakably noticing positive gains from these adjustments. 

At this year’s Monaco Grand Prix, Mercedes did make some progress toward a downwash sidepod solution more like to Red Bull’s, but it has not yet gone as far as some other teams. However, he believes that McLaren’s clear use of the concept and effective exploitation of it may well cause some rethinking and spur another attempt to examine it.   

Toto Wolff, CEO of Mercedes, said when asked why his company did not adopt Red Bull’s strategy despite the fact that others thought it would result in positive gains: “We had the sidepod concept and the bodywork in the tunnel pretty early on, to see which paths you could open up and how much it would add to performance. 

And, according to team principal Toto Wolff, that is because when it tried out a Red Bull design in its wind tunnel early on it did not find any benefit – and in fact made its car worse. 

Wolff is still of the opinion that rather than improving the exterior bodywork of Mercedes, more performance can be extracted from the vehicle’s interior and underneath. 

“The sidepods and the bodywork are just one part of the chassis, and it clearly looks like there are interesting solutions that it opens up,” the man remarked. But the floor and the diffuser account for the majority of the performance, and we haven’t seen how they read the rules and implemented them”.

Also read: Some changes that have turned the McLaren into an F1 rocketship