1 Red Bull earns “payback” as Mercedes cracks under pressure
Red Bull described its victory at Paul Ricard as “payback”, having beaten Mercedes at one of its strongholds – and after all that sniping about flexi-wings and tyre pressure proscriptions too.
The last time F1 visited the south of France in 2019, Mercedes finished 1-2 and Max Verstappen trailed nearly 35 seconds behind, having qualified over a second off Lewis Hamilton. This time, Max took pole and, thankfully, we had a proper race.
Red Bull trimmed the rear wing on RB16B, focusing on straightline speed while asking the drivers to hang on in the twisty bits. Mercedes ran a higher-downforce configuration, offering greater cornering stability at the expense of drag.
When Verstappen arrived at Turn 1 ahead after the start, it looked as though a procession would ensue, but Max lost control as the wind unsettled his car, handing the impetus to Lewis. Game on.
Hamilton edged clear as Verstappen struggled against the wind and lower than expected grip. As Hamilton’s lead grew, Mercedes looked in command. But its race unravelled following the call to pit
Valtteri Bottas early at the end of lap 17 of 53.
“The concern on Valtteri’s car was an increasing vibration that was getting worse and worse, starting to get to levels where we will box the car for reliability concerns,” said Mercedes engineering director Andrew Shovlin. “In reality, Valtteri’s stop triggered the pitstops at the front. And that drove us to having to do a very long stint with Lewis.”
Red Bull successfully covered Bottas by stopping Verstappen at the end of lap 18, then surprisingly retook the lead after Mercedes serviced Hamilton’s car at the end of lap 19. Hamilton’s stop took 2.2s, a tenth less than Verstappen’s, but Lewis was six tenths slower on his in-lap and arrived at Turn 1 to see Max sweep past on the inside…
“My out-lap was good, but I didn’t expect the undercut to be so big,” said Verstappen. “I suddenly had so much more grip on the tyres. I think nobody – including us – expected to undercut Lewis.”
Max was correct. Mercedes was also confused. “I think we had the quicker car, probably,” said team boss Toto Wolff. “We lost the race at the stop, thinking we had enough protection against the undercut. We had a solid three-second gap and that wasn’t enough as it looks. And from then on, we were on the back foot. We got it wrong.”
Shovlin said Mercedes “don’t fully understand why our models were telling us that we would have been OK – we can account for about two and a half seconds of the three seconds”.
Red Bull then made what Christian Horner labelled a “ballsy call” by switching Verstappen to a two-stop and asking him to battle back to the front, while Sergio Pérez remained on a conventional one-stop plan to keep pressure on Mercedes.
Mercedes stuck rigidly to its unbalanced strategy, which asked too much of Pirelli’s hard tyres. The fronts ran out of grip too soon, leaving Bottas – audibly furious at Mercedes ignoring his earlier pleas to two-stop – defenceless against Pérez, and ultimately Lewis too against Max.
Hamilton was fairly sanguine in defeat, but Mercedes’ chief strategist James Vowles, not for the first time, apologised publicly: “This one’s on us”.
2 Mclaren tops midfield as Ferrari slumps
Mclaren team principal Andreas Seidl could do a decent sideline in soothsaying. He predicted after qualifying that Lando Norris (10th) and Daniel Ricciardo (eighth) would fare better in the race – and so it proved. The Mclarens finished best of the rest while chief rival Ferrari slumped to its first pointless result of the season.
Ricciardo – boosted by braking tweaks to his car – started stronger, but was less comfortable with his car’s handling than Norris, and a relatively early pitstop (lap 16) to jump Carlos Sainz and Pierre Gasly made the rest of Ricciardo’s race harder. Norris waited until lap 24 to stop, then scythed his way through to fifth, 11.8s clear of Ricciardo.
Sainz started fifth but dropped to 11th, while Charles Leclerc stopped earlier than everyone (lap 14) so bad was his tyre degradation. He finished 16th after starting seventh. Ferrari thus gave up third in the constructors’ standings to Mclaren too.
“We have a very narrow window of working range on our front tyres so struggle a lot more with graining or with front wear,” explained Sainz.
Team boss Mattia Binotto added: “We knew coming here it would have been a difficult circuit in that respect, high speed corners where you’re putting a lot of energy to the tyres, hot conditions.
“Can we address it with a simple development? We may improve the situation but to solve it we need to have some hardware change, like the rims, which is not possible for [this] regulation.”
More of the same until next year then…
3 Russell’s “best ever race” for Williams
Sainz was the last runner to finish on the lead lap. Behind him (in 12th) came George Russell, who hailed this his best race yet for Williams given no cars retired.
Not for the first time Russell struggled away from 15th on the grid. He ran 18th behind teammate Nicholas Latifi early on. After stopping on lap 17 (the same lap as Bottas) Russell made his set of hard tyres last superbly, beating Yuki Tsunoda’s Alphatauri, Esteban Ocon’s Alpine, both Alfa Romeos and Leclerc.
“Finishing ahead of these cars and finishing 12th on merit, I would go as far as saying that is probably our best ever race together [with Williams],” Russell told Sky Sports.