The development war for the 2022 F1 season is on! The new 2022 regulations have allowed the teams to develop the cars from their understanding of it. The main area of development for the new cars is the side pods. Several F1 teams have brought out different kinds of side pods for their cars to better airflow. But the new Mercedes side pods have got the eye of everyone, including their rivals Red Bull.

The German team brought out drastic changes to their sideboards for the official pre-season test in Bahrain. While we could not spot any new upgrades on the Red Bull for day one of testing.

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The Red Bull chief designer Adrian Newey provided an update on when can we expect the new upgrades on the RB18.

Red Bull to bring in upgrades in the latter half of pre-season testing

As reported by AutoMotorUndSport, Newey revealed that the Austrian team will bring in new upgrades on days 2 and 3 of the test. He also mentioned that the upgrades would be significant and can be spotted very clearly by everyone.

“You will recognize them with the naked eye,” said Newey on the Red Bull’s upgrades.

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The new Mercedes sidepods are being touted as another piece of development masterpiece, Former F1 driver and Sky Sports pundit Martin Brundle compared the new design to a bar of melted chocolate.

“We’ve already seen this morning with the Mercedes. They have a massive new shape. It looks like a bar of chocolate has been left out in the sun and melted, such as the bodywork wrapping around what must be a very creative cooling system on the car,” said the Sky pundit.

It would be interesting to see if the new sidepods can give the world champions an edge over their competitors. Since it is just testing, it would be hard to know if they gained or lost performance compared to their rivals.

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If they run this new design at the first race of the season, then we will get a clearer idea about their performance. Let’s see if the new side pods are a masterpiece or a failed experiment.