Mercedes chief technical officer James Allison believes teams who go the wrong way with their 2022 Formula 1 cars will be in for a “terribly painful year”.

Just under a month until pre-season testing begins at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya on February 23, teams preparing to launch their 2022 car designs.

The new rules are seen as the biggest overhaul in the regulations since 2009, with the aim to create better racing and increase competition among the grid.

There is huge anticipation over how different each team will have gone with their respective concepts, in a bid to get on top of rules reset faster than their rivals.

But Allison predicts one or two teams will get the design of their 2022 challengers “really badly wrong”, which he suspects will lead to them facing a tough season ahead.

“Everyone in our team, and everyone in every other team, will have done our level best to try to find a design and an approach that will be a happy match to this new regulation set,” Allison said in a Mercedes video previewing the 2022 rules.

“And we’ll all get to find out together at the start of this season, in the races that unfold from there, exactly how that shakes out.

“I would imagine, given that the cars are so new and so different, that one or two cars on the grid will have got it really badly wrong. And they will have a terribly painful year.

“I would imagine that all of us to some degree will have will have left things on the table that we just didn’t anticipate. And we will look at other cars and think ‘oh, why didn’t we think of that?’

“Then we’ll be scrambling around to try to get that idea onto our car as fast as possible, so that we can claw our way, from whatever position we land in that first race, forwards. Or, if we’re lucky enough to be in front, to keep the attacking wolves behind us.

“It’s going to be quite a rush and definitely something that’s going to keep us all from having too much sleep for the whole of the season.”

Mercedes goes into 2022 with its constructors’ championship crown on the line, having won the last eight titles during the V6 hybrid era.

Allison said that while Mercedes is excited about the challenges faced with the new regulations, it is also mindful of the jeopardy they pose.

“When the regulations change in such large measure as these ones, then we approach that with all the fun and relish that that challenge deserves,” Allison said.

“Our job is to look for technical opportunity and regulations, and then use our combined wit and skill and all the effort that we make collectively, to try to find a configuration of car that will be better than anyone else’s approach to it.

“When everything is as new as this, then everywhere you look in that regulation set, [which is] twice as thick as the old one, there’s opportunity.

“There’s opportunity. And of course, there’s jeopardy, and we try to pick our way through the potential minefield and pick up all the little boxes of treasure that may be set in amongst the landmines, to end up with a car that we hope will see us pitching at the front of the grid.”