F1 changes help spark title fight
Lewis Hamilton helped Mercedes to victory in the Formula 1 season opener in Bahrain, but it is Red Bull that has a genuine pace advantage.
A combination of an aggressive strategy from Mercedes, plus some great tyre management and defensive driving from Hamilton, was enough for him to hold off
Max Verstappen for the win at Sakhir (see page 18).
Yet that success has not disguised the fact that Red Bull’s RB16B appears to hold the edge right now in speed terms – both on the straights and in the highspeed corners, where Mercedes has excelled in the past.
“We don’t really have any strengths relative to them,” said Mercedes head of trackside engineering Andrew Shovlin.
“We’ve had a lot of years where we’ve been able to rely on straightline speed, or high-speed cornering or interconnecting corners. But you look at it here and we weren’t taking any time out of them anywhere.
“And that’s really the main thing. In qualifying we’re just bang on their pace in our best corners and they’re quicker in the others. So we need a faster car, as simple as that.”
Mercedes is still battling to find a good balance with its W12, and matters were not helped in Bahrain with it encountering some derating issues with its power unit – where its energy recovery systems run out of power too early on the straights.
Verstappen’s pace in qualifying, where he ended up 0.388 seconds clear of Hamilton, showed the kind of performance advantage that Red Bull may have right now. Perhaps the biggest sign of the step forward that Red Bull has made is that it ended up so disappointed to lose out on the win – whereas in 2020 every second place was a bonus.
“Last year we would have been super-happy with this result and now we are disappointed, so we definitely made a good step forward,” said Verstappen. “Of course it is still a long season, so we just have to get on with it and try to do better.”
One factor that appears to have played a decisive swing in the battle between Mercedes and Red Bull is the impact of F1’s new 2021 aero rules. In particular, the changes to the floor – with a section ahead of the rear tyres having been cut away and the use of slots and holes along the side banned – appear to have hurt low-rake cars such as the Mercedes more than high-rake concepts such as Red Bull’s.
Aston Martin team boss
Otmar Szafnauer suggested over the Bahrain GP weekend that the data pointed to the swing between the high-rake and low-rake cars being as much as one second per lap.
Comparisons of the qualifying times from 2020 to 2021 showed that Red Bull, Alphatauri and Mclaren had all lost 1.3-1.4s over the winter, while Mercedes and Aston were more than 2s down.
While the floor changes may explain what has happened, Mercedes knows it cannot use that as an excuse for letting the
2021 title battle slip away from its grasp. Team boss Toto Wolff said:
“If we say, ‘Well, we were just penalised by the regulation, that’s it’, we wouldn’t be racers and we wouldn’t be fighters. We just need to get that car in its sweet spot so it can combat with our competitors.”
Mercedes’ bid to fight back and make up for the deficit, especially in high-speed corners, is complicated
by the homologation limits imposed on teams this year as part of the COVID-19 cost cuts – which means it can’t upgrade its engine or devote too much resource to aero gains.
Furthermore, teams are juggling the need to work on 2022’s new F1 cars with pushing on with improving their current challengers.
Shovlin (above) added: “We’re having to look at more subtle areas to do with driveability characteristics and also arriving at the circuit with the car well sorted, well balanced, doing your homework, knowing how long the tyres will run.
“This championship is going to come down to the fine margins, more than normal. I don’t see us really being able to develop to a point where we can get clear ahead and hopefully Red Bull won’t either.”