The first four races have shown that Red Bull has a faster car in qualifying, but Mercedes is ahead when it comes to tire management over longer runs.
The advantage the Mercedes had in tire maintenance was evident at last weekend’s Spanish Grand Prix, when Lewis Hamilton’s rubber seemed in much better shape than Max Verstappen’s at the end of the stints.
However, Mercedes track engineer Andrew Shovlin is not yet convinced that the race pace advantage is guaranteed in every location and suggests that the problem seems to revolve around the car’s balance.
“We are still not ready to believe we have a better racing car or take better care of the tires,” he explained.
“It’s actually pretty hard to say what it was [in the Spanish GP]. We could sit behind them and if you’re the leading car and someone can sit on your transmission for a whole stint, that’s usually not good news.
“But we’re still in the phase of the year when we’re collecting data across the various routes. But it seems like a trend that we might have a slightly more neutral car.
“Yours seems to be a bit harder on the rear tires over a stint, while we use both axles quite well. But we will see with some more data whether this is really a feature of the car or just how we adjust it. “
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Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing RB16B, Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes W12
Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images
Red Bull team boss Christian Horner believes that Mercedes undoubtedly had the pace advantage in the last few races, but remains confident that its squad is much closer than it was 12 months ago.
“I think the racing speed of the Mercedes, and we’ve seen it since Bahrain, has been better than ours at every GP we’ve seen so far,” he said. “I think their degradation was better than ours.
“So we knew that these last two tracks would show their strengths. They did that. But we’re much closer than ever and I think if we can find a little more racing pace, it’s still very, very close between the two cars. “
