Opinion: Alex Kalinauckas

A quick car has given Verstappen just one win so far, but he’s hardly adrift in the points. The team is sure to hit back, and the title fight temperature could yet spike

“The race continued the trend of Red Bull’s Saturday pace not quite converting on a Sunday”

It would be understandable if the Red Bull Formula 1 team is feeling somewhat frustrated after the first four races of 2021. Aided by the changes to the rear-floor rules, Red Bull has closed the gap to the Mercedes squad that in 2020 produced what is likely to go down as one of the best F1 cars in history, and started the season with the fastest car. And yet the Black Arrows squad still leads both championships, with Lewis Hamilton now on three victories to Max Verstappen’s one following his Spanish Grand Prix triumph last Sunday.

It would be easy for Red Bull to say – and indeed, it is saying, via Verstappen in an understandable attempt to put a positive spin on defeat in a race where he led 54 laps – that“compared to last year it has been a big jump forwards”. But competitors at sport’s highest level just aren’t wired to accept‘good enough’. And you can be sure that Red Bull is as motivated by the Barcelona loss as it is disappointed that Mercedes was able to wrest back the win.

Take Hamilton. After sealing seven world titles, he’s now made the best ever start in a wildly successful F1 career (although he only edges the start he made in 2015 because of his Imola fastest lap point). He knows that‘good enough’simply won’t cut it.

Red Bull now must harness the motivation stemming from the opening events of 2021. Seeing the lengths to which Hamilton and Mercedes are going to preserve their respective positions is inspirational from the outside, so Red Bull must turn that into its own positive progress and not fall into a cycle of despondency. Hamilton may be on 94 points out of a possible maximum of 104, but Verstappen is on 80. It’s the Dutchman’s best start to a season too, and Red Bull is firmly in the hunt.

That was also clear from its pace last weekend. The Barcelona race continued the trend of Red Bull’s Saturday pace not quite converting on a Sunday, with rear-tyre degradation towards the end of a stint the key difference versus Mercedes, which used tactical brilliance to solve the Barcelona overtaking problem.

But Mercedes itself has proved that rear-end car trouble can be improved, as evidenced by its progress since testing.

Defeat at Barcelona also doesn’t necessarily mean that the pecking order is now set. The big development push that teams would normally bring to Barcelona to cover them for the middle part of the season hasn’t happened, so the‘fine margins’work and minor improvement remains key. Mercedes simply can’t develop its way clear (although the same is true for Red Bull).

Red Bull did something interesting in Spain. Mercedes observed its rival running considerably more downforce in practice, which it removed for qualifying and the race. Mercedes, said Andrew Shovlin, was“running our max downforce swing”across the weekend. This, plus Verstappen’s pace in the technical final sector at Barcelona (he was faster there in qualifying), suggests Red Bull will be strong in Monaco, where it has historically gone well in the turbo-hybrid era, and again in Hungary before the summer break. Monaco comes next and is surely now a‘must-win’event for Red Bull.

Looking further ahead, the historical formbook is likely to be a key indicator for the next phase of the season, and it doesn’t look too bad for Red Bull. While Baku (aside from Daniel Ricciardo’s 2017 win for Red Bull) and Paul Ricard have been something of Mercedes strongholds since joining the calendar, it has done well on home turf in Austria (where Mercedes’track record is comparatively poor of late) and it won the last race at Silverstone. Mercedes struggled considerably on the resurfaced Istanbul Park before Hamilton’s wet-weather brilliance won it the 2020 race but, after the UK government’s announcement that Turkey is now on its travel‘red list’, its status is far from clear at the time of writing.

It is further down the line where things get murkier for both squads. Mercedes and Hamilton have traditionally been supreme in the second half of the season. But 2022 is looming and therefore the typical development gains won’t likely be coming.

Predictions in modern F1 are fraught with peril. But what if there’s something really unexpected in store for the next part of F1 2021’s title fight? Verstappen’s Turn 1 move at Barcelona was just on the right side of acceptable. He needed Hamilton to be compliant, which the world champion was because“i don’t get too aggressive when I don’t need to be”.

In the post-race press conference, Hamilton chose his words very carefully when discussing the start. The title contenders have had start clashes in two of the four races so far. At Imola, Hamilton was arguably the aggressor, keeping himself alongside Verstappen in a sequence where he was always going to be run out of room. At Barcelona, Verstappen forced the issue.

Hamilton has the sense and experience to stay clear of a public spat over these moves, but there is a sense that something is building. Sooner or later, there may be fireworks.

And perhaps that will be the destabilising factor that gives one of the teams the ultimate edge.