With less scope for designers to think outside the box for innovative solutions, the likelihood was of a grid of lookalike ground effect machines. But things did not quite play out that way, with one of the most stark differences between teams being their sidepod solutions.
At the start of the year, there was a wide variety of different sidepod concepts at play, with Ferrari's inwash, Red Bull's downwash and Mercedes' no pod solutions all at different ends of the spectrum.
