F1 just can’t afford another Merc victory

WITH about an hour to go at the Circuit de Catalunya illusions seemed to have been shattered or at least dented.

The red team’s aura of invulnerability was punctured for the first time over the course of the eight days of testing. The Scuderia looked to have the quickest car, the best handling car, the most reliable car.

For most of the test their drivers – the best pairing in F1 even if they don’t have the best driver outright – sat comfortably atop the timesheets. Even when others pipped them on occasion, they did so with glory runs.

Up to then Ferrari’s advantage over their nearest rivals, Mercedes, seemed significant. Experts reckoned three or four tenths of a second. Then Lewis Hamilton took to the track with the Barcelona light fading and set a time within three thousands of a second of Sebastian Vettel, so close as to make no meaningful difference.

For anybody hoping – yearning even – for a change at the top of the order, it was a sobering reminder of just how effective a force the Silver Arrows are. For the last five years they’ve been the pre-eminent if not dominant force on the grid and after a while that gets a little tiresome.

Their level of dominance isn’t unprecedented – Ferrari won six constructors championships in succession from 1999, for instance – but it is more than a touch monotonous. Without change, without new stories to tell, people’s interest will inevitably wane as it did during the Schumacher era.

For a sport that’s already lost up to a third of its audience in the last decade – thanks in large part to it going behind a pay wall in a lot of countries – another year of Mercedes on top wouldn’t really be ideal.

Of course, there’s still plenty of reason to believe this will be a competitive season. Ferrari’s race pace does look better than Mercedes’. Even Red Bull might muscle their way into contention on occasion with new engine partner Honda. Still if Hamilton is on pole early on Sunday morning and races off into the distance we probably won’t be the only ones despairing.