A complete heart-breaker for Red Bull. Mercedes had a weird strategy, but it ended up not costing them anything? Maybe it paid off? Either way, this season looks like an actual fight between 3 teams for the top spot if Ferarri can keep it up. Mercedes has clearly lost their technical edge over the other teams too. It is much more of a fair fight. Red Bull’s issues are hopefully early season problems with the new car, and not systemic issues that will hold them back all season.
Haas!!! Competitive? A mid-pack group? Possibly fighting for a spot on the podium at some point this year? (I mean, you know, if a couple of the big three has a bad week) It is nice to see them competitive. Last year was such a shame.
I’m not optimistic about a three-way battle unless Mercedes finds a considerable amount of pace at some point this season (and assuming Red Bull’s reliability issues are a one off). They were comfortably behind Ferrari and Red Bull until the safety car bunched the field together—and still fell 10 seconds behind in about 10 laps—and then the RBs dying got them a podium (and yes, I’ll admit to giggling like a loon when Verstappen’s car stopped, but felt bad when the same happened to Perez). Upshot for them is Mercedes were well ahead of Haas and Alfa Romeo, but that the bottom finishing cars were all Mercedes powered suggests a PU issue.
That was a fun race. Some great racing in the first half especially. Karma was trending on Twitter for sports afterward. Something to do with Verstappen, what was that about?
Loved having F1 without commercials on ESPN, but those Sky guys were a bit annoying. I miss the old English guys who used to do it for Fox Sports.
Salty Hamilton fans still upset about last season presumably. They should root against Verstappen because he’s a bit petulant like what I do instead of harping on past slights and perceived biases.
The lack of Mercedes pace was crazy, and also worth noting that every Mercedes powered car (other than the factory team) finished in the bottom half of the field – Aston Martin, McLaren, and Williams made up the last bottom six places among the cars that finished the race. Every single Ferrari powered car finished ahead of those six.
Equally bonkers: 3 of the 4 Red Bull (formerly Honda) powered cars DNF’d.
Unclear to me whether the Red Bull issue is a one-off, or if Mercedes will fix their issues, but man, I’m guessing it was a hell of a race to be a tifosi/Ferrari fan.
McLaren face planting the new car kind of sucks. I knew one team was going to get it all wrong, but ugh. I’ll have to root for Ferrari until they get their crap together. I can’t freaking stand Max so I was highly amused when his car broke.
Like, I get that the Merc’s didn’t do well, but I guess after so much dominance I am not ready to take the 1 race sample size we have as reason to expect them not to compete this year.
is there a specific regulation, that caused the Mercedes to drop off? They dominated and last year was close. What happened? I read there is a budget limitation, true?
It’s an entirely new Formula - the cars are wildly different to even last year’s version.
They’ve clearly got an aero problem causing the car to severely bottom out at high speed which means they have to raise the ride height to mitigate that, (especially for race fuel situations), and that lowers performance.
Then the rear wing setup they had for [Fast Car] proves to be too draggy for [Less Fast Car] impacting them even more.
In the race they could see they had no threat from behind and no realistic chance to push the teams in front, so they made a failed gamble on hard tyres that made them even slower.
Mercedes used to be able to buy time to work around problems by just leaning on their engine advantages, but Honda and especially Ferrari have caught up on that front, so now there’s no margin left.
I don’t expect this weekend’s race to be any different, but if we get to Italy and there’s no progress that’s going to suggest this just won’t be their year.
It’s a whole new redesign for this year. That’s why Haas all of the sudden isn’t dead last. They didn’t invest anything in their old car the last couple of seasons and just focused on the new one. It seems like Merc still has balance issues, but I’m sure they will sort it out quickly. McLaren seems to have much bigger problems that won’t be as easy to fix. The next race should be very telling to see if it’s a repeat of last week.
what does this mean? I thought every team builds their car how they want. Noob here. I know there is a weight limitation, maybe budget, and some parts are enforced.
Well, there a lots of rules around the design basically. So the game is to see how far you can bend them to your advantage.
What happened this year was a fairly extensive aero redesign aimed at making it possible to follow closely enough to race, something that’s not been happening in F1 for awhile.
The rules changes on design were radical enough that we’re still sorting out who got caught out by them, and whether the 3 laps of actual racing between Verstappen and Le Clerc was a real indication the changes have resulted in what we’re hoping for, racing.
It’s called Formula 1 because the rulebook is essentially a formula.
Unlike Indycar which is a “spec” series where you buy a car and then change the setup, in Formula 1 there’s a collection of “don’t do this and don’t do that” and then you build a car that in your (lawyer’s) interpretation satisfies all of those rules.
The last major change was an engine change in 2014 and Mercedes made that transition better than anyone by an absolute mile and won 15 of the subsequent 16 (constructor and driver) championships.
Before that in 2009 there was an aero change and Brawn F1 (which is now the Mercedes team) was one of three teams that noticed a way to interpret those rules that gave them an advantage.
As a result Brawn won six of the first seven races and then when everyone else’s development caught up they hung on enough to win both titles that year.
Major Formula changes tend to bring these results where the pack is shuffled and this particular change also coincided with both an expenditure cap and a limitation on wind tunnel hours with the lower-ranked teams getting much more time to test their designs.
I expect Mercedes to be back, the question is whether it’ll be quickly enough to still challenge this season.
it’s regulated a lot … interstingly, Ferrari came out pretty well. Whatever happened to Red Bull will be fixed. And Mercedes has some work to do. Will be quite interesting season. There used to be an official F1 TV stream that you can buy/subscribe to. They don’t offer that anymore, in Germany, the license is with Sky TV … and it is expensive, 20$ per month and a 1 year plan minimum.
I like McLaren too, so am also disappointed, especially after the promise of last year. Their IndyCar team—to which I’m fairly indifferent as I like other teams/drivers more in that series—is sucking this year as well. I’ve read the car is actually very good at medium- and high-speed corners, but there aren’t too many of those and tracks that do have them also tend to have high-speed straights which the McLaren doesn’t seem good at so I’m not sure how much of advantage that ultimately is. Likely a rough year for them.
It’s only one race, you guys are being awfully pessimistic. The teams are still learning the cars and adjusting things. If by race 4 they haven’t turned things around, then I will be worried for them. As a Ferrari fan though, I wouldn’t mind if McLaren had a bad season.
Lando has said the car isn’t as weak in medium and high speed corners, but they don’t have enough total downforce on the car. This causes them to be slow in low speed corners and also causes tyre issues.
Their front brake issues at the second test also cost them running time, so they’re behind where they’d like to be. The atmosphere around the team has been pretty positive under Zak and Andreas, so it’ll be interesting to see how they go now with a bit of adversity.
I’m not so much pro-Hamilton, as I am anti Max. I’m sure Max is a talented driver but he seems like a real ass. Plus he was getting away with ridiculous stuff last year. If the inside car has no intention of making the corner of course he’s going to get ahead of the outside car if the outside car is actually trying to make the turn. If that’s the rules you’re letting people drive with what’s the point of racing at all.
I’m sad to hear that McLaren is doing badly. I suppose Mercedes Engines having problems means no chance of a Williams comeback to at least the midfield? I do like Charles and Carlos, so that’s at least something.
The interviews I’ve seen of Lando seem to be him admitting he expects that they will stink for most of the season. He is kind of a negative nancy on his chances each week even when the car was running well so we’ll see. It could just be the first two races suck and then they have enough info to start at least climbing back.
