Mercedes escaped Imola with its intact lead at both Formula 1 World Championships, but the team has no illusions about the remaining gap with Red Bull.
Lewis Hamilton took pole position for Mercedes on Saturday, supported by mistakes by Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez. A rocket launch from Verstappen then put Red Bull in control of the race and resulted in its first win of the year. After a rare mistake, he made a brilliant recovery to second place without blushing Hamilton.
Andrew Shovlin, technical director on the side of the track at Mercedes, admitted after the race that it was a “relief” to continue to lead the scoring for drivers and designers, and that Red Bull still has a performance deficit that needs to be overcome.
“They’ll win this championship if we don’t improve our car very quickly,” Shovlin said of Red Bull. “It’s really our attitude – that we’re still the ones who chase.”
Red Bull F1 boss Christian Horner said after the race he expected the title fight to be settled through marginal wins between the two teams, with an early battlefield in 2021 around tire management.
Mercedes may have had issues with the instability of the W12 car as a result of the downforce cuts for 2021, but the team has worked to fix the issue for the first two races. Valtteri Bottas said he felt “much happier” with the car after winning both training sessions on Friday, which gave the Finn hope to lead the fight to Red Bull.
Valtteri Bottas, Mercedes W12
Photo by: Charles Coates / Motorsport Images
But Bottas’ weekend broke up due to a completely different problem in qualifying. After setting a time in the first quarter that would have been good enough for fourth on the grid if it had been set in the third quarter, his pace slowed and he finished in a low eighth on the grid.
Bottas said after qualifying that he was having trouble entering the corner, which is a new problem in Bahrain that Mercedes later linked to tire warming up. The problem became even more apparent in the race when Bottas tried to get his tires into the correct temperature window in cool conditions, leaving him behind Lance Stroll in the first stint. George Russell was able to gain time on the Finn thanks to his warmer slick tires, which had done two laps earlier than Bottas’ own media, before crashing at Turn 2 at the end of the race.
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For Mercedes, this means a change in happiness. The team has traditionally done better in cooler conditions and struggled more in the heat with their youngest cars. Now it has the opposite problem.
“Over the years we’ve often had problems in hot conditions and the cold was usually good because we warmed up well,” said Bottas. “We really tried to develop the car, but we didn’t overheat the tires, but with the disadvantage, of course, that some other cars might do better than us if we have to get on the tires quickly.
“For me personally, compared to Lewis for example, qualifying is so razor-sharp that you sometimes get it to work – like me in the first quarter, when I had a much faster time than the third quarter, I have them to work brought.
“It’s about a degree or two of surface or tire temperature. It is hard to explain. Obviously the track temperature changed a little depending on how much cloud there was. Maybe that had a small impact. “
Valtteri Bottas, Mercedes W12, Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing RB16B and Lance Stroll, Aston Martin AMR21
Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images
Shovlin said the tire warm-up issue is something Mercedes will need to work on to help Bottas get his difficult start to the season back on track.
“The thing about tire temperature, it’s often a very small difference that has a very big impact on grip,” said Shovlin. “Unfortunately for Valtteri he was just the wrong side on a lot of cars and that gave him a very compromised starting position. That’s one thing we have to work on, to work with him and help him understand.
“In the race he struggled to follow and overtake just because he lost the front end in tow but the rear wasn’t strong either, and again it was this issue that warming up was a problem for him.
“When transitioning to medium, the warm up meant he got trapped in a line of cars with some backmarkers, Max, coming through as the leader, and that was what really started the sequence that ended his race.
“I think all of the negatives are due to this problem of warming up in these conditions and we need to find a solution to that. If we do that, the rest should snap into place.”
While tire warming up might be a current Achilles heel for the W12 car, tire management as a whole is actually one of the areas Red Bull believes it is lagging on.
In Bahrain, Hamilton was able to keep his hard tires alive for half the race and – with some thanks to the controversy over the track restrictions – beat Verstappen, who drove much fresher tires.
Horner felt a similar picture unfolding in Imola towards the end of the first stint on intermediate tires. Hamilton had lagged about five seconds before Verstappen for the first half of the race, then dodged as they approached the crossover point to switch to slicks.
Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing RB16B, Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes W12
Photo by: Charles Coates / Motorsport Images
Verstappen beamed his engineer round after round and asked when it was time for the pit. He managed to get a one-lap lead over the Mercedes by arriving early. This increased the gap to five seconds again, only that Hamilton quickly closed before his mistake at Tosa.
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“The pace is obviously very close to Mercedes and I think there are strengths and weaknesses of the cars in different areas,” said Horner.
“I think if you look at the performance at Inter, we were faster at the beginning of the stint and they were faster at the end of the stint. The wear pattern on the tires looks very different between the two cars and I would say.
“As soon as they are switched on, obviously the same tire specification, in clean air, [Mercedes] looked very, very competitive. In fact, he got the fastest lap.
“It’s very tight and it’s about getting the best out of the car on a case-by-case basis. But I would say again that, like in Bahrain, Mercedes looked a little stronger than us at the end of the breaks. “
Shovlin explained how Mercedes struck the balance between quickly warming up the tires and preserving the compounds for a long period of time, making him unsure of the advantage Red Bull had.
“There is always a compromise between the warm-up and the longer run,” said Shovlin after the race. “We have to see whether we have correctly understood this compromise. The looks we saw at the Inter look like yes [Red Bull] did [have better warm-up] – although Lewis obviously suffered this damage.
Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes W12, leaves his pits
Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images
“It’s not that clear on the middle tire. I thought we did pretty good at warming up there compared to them. “
Of course, as F1 approaches summer in Europe, the warmer conditions could help solve some tire warming issues – and Bottas in particular.
At the moment, however, it is a compromise that Mercedes is trying to master in order to protect its points advantage from faster opponents.
Sparks follow behind Valtteri Bottas, Mercedes W12
Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images
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