At the end of Friday, Mercedes waved along to the sounds of people shouting that Mercedes is having problems in Azerbaijan. “There is something radically wrong in the car,” said Valtteri Bottas. “There is nothing more in it,” suggested Lewis Hamilton. And team boss Toto Wolff has already said that they are working towards perhaps the most difficult qualifying ever.
Mercedes dives into the role of underdog, as we know it a bit from Mercedes in all honesty, but looking at the race pace of Lewis Hamilton on the medium tires, it is really not that bad for Mercedes. In fact, Lewis Hamilton was secretly going quite fast.
Verstappen and Hamilton never actually rode together on the same rubber on Friday afternoon. A direct comparison of the lap times is difficult, but they were on the track at the same time. Verstappen drove on the soft tires, Hamilton on the medium tires. And what Hamilton showed on those yellow tires was impressive.
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On tires that Pirelli says are eight-tenths slower than the soft tires, he was consistently within half a second of the Red Bull driver’s times. In fact, more than once he admitted only two tenths. Now it is not to be expected that Verstappen would have been up to six tenths slower than Hamilton on the medium tires, but it does shed a different light on Hamilton’s performance. Incidentally, Valtteri Bottas was invariably six to seven tenths slower per lap than Hamilton on the soft tires. If the Finn says he is off track, it sounds a lot more plausible than when Hamilton says so.
Did Mercedes play hide and seek on Friday? Not on the medium tires anyway, because those times are also available to everyone. If Mercedes has a problem at all, it’s at the start of a run. The problem seems to be that Mercedes is not getting the tires up to temperature fast enough. This applies to the medium tires, but certainly also to the soft tires. It makes Hamilton repeatedly complain about a lack of grip when accelerating out of the slow corners.
It’s not for nothing that Trackside Engineering Director Andrew Shovlin referred to the ‘single lap’ as the great Achilles’ heel. And that can become a problem for the qualification if one cannot identify the cause. But one night may be enough to find the problem. Max Verstappen complained a lot about his Red Bull two weeks ago in Monaco after Friday, with which he could not do exactly what he wanted. A day later, however, it was completely different.
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What role does Ferrari play in all this?
Ferrari shouted to anyone who wanted to hear that they would not just participate in the front again in Baku. On Friday they proved their own wrong. However, that too is purely looking at the time lists. Ferrari is taking the opposite route compared to Mercedes. Does Mercedes need time to get the tires up to temperature and then make them last a long time, at Ferrari the tires are direct’ready to go‘. It explains that Ferrari is in good shape from the first meters, but the chassis is not yet very economical with the tires. In the race there is a risk of losing a good qualifying result.
Mercedes only seems good in the long runs and Ferrari only in the qualifying runs. And Red Bull? Max Verstappen’s team is the most all-round: “We are fast in both the short and long runs”, confirmed team advisor Helmut Marko. That shows that Red Bull can really go in all directions with the car.
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