The race is on, and the Mercedes W12 that everyone expects to take an unprecedented eighth consecutive double world championship has broken cover.

But will it live up to its illustrious predecessors or might the aerodynamic rule changes trip Mercedes up. I'm Ed Staurant,

joining me to answer those questions and more are Gary Anderson and Mark Hughes. Well, Gary, actually,

the most important question is our traditional starter on these launch podcasts. Where do you write this one?

This had what you asked for. Car, Drivers, Team Boss, Technical Director. Yeah, this is the first real, I suppose you might call it car release we've seen this year. All the rest have I'd been a gimmick of something else, which never really, you don't really take it with a, as the truth of what's really going on, whenever you see all the gimmicks around it. But Mercedes just done the job the way they've always done the job they've got

the car there they got two drivers there they got the team boss technical director they talked about the

car and you know okay they've hidden the sort of details down the sides of the floor and rightly so

you know they they referenced it to say that they didn't want to show their their solutions for it just yet which

I agree 100% with but you know they didn't they didn't hide it by not taking pictures of it you know there

was some good pictures of the car so we saw the car we met the people we got their intentions for the

season and from what I see there's better look out yeah it's a very confident team in terms of what it can and cannot show, isn't it?

I mean, Mark, it was good that James Allison wasn't afraid of pointing out a few things,

where there were things you didn't want to talk about.

He said, no, we've hidden the floor.

We don't want you seeing that.

But it just seems that they know exactly what they're about,

whereas other teams just seem to hide everything through paranoia. Mercedes have a very clear understanding of what they can talk about, what they can hide.

Yeah, well, I guess all those championships give them a certain amount of confidence, and so they're

not shy about, you know, giving, letting us see that they've made a very aggressive attempt at

optimising the car under these new

regulations and when you look at the the sort of lumps and bumps on the car there's clearly a lot

of re-engineering got on in terms of side pod shapes and also what they've done with the power

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