There was little doubt that Mercedes had the fastest car two weeks ago in Melbourne, but on Saturday night in Bahrain it was a completely different story. In warmer conditions on a different style of circuit and with a much more abrasive track surface, Scuderia Ferrari proved to be the team to beat and Mercedes were the team left scrabbling for answers. After the swings in performance at various races last season, the change at the front of the grid probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise. But there was still an expectation ahead of qualifying that Mercedes would pull something out of the bag in Q3 to propel Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas ahead of the Ferraris. As things turned out that was not the case.
Ferrari’s margin wasn’t huge, however. Bottas was just 0.023s off Kimi Raikkonen in second place and Hamilton was only another 0.096s behind his teammate. But regardless of the size of the gap, Ferrari still had the advantage and Mercedes had no easy excuses.
“I think if you look at my lap now, it doesn’t look tacky,” Hamilton said after qualifying. “I think it’s very hard for people to read into it that it’s looking tacky — it was quite a clean lap in general. I don’t have any answers, I don’t know why we don’t have the pace this weekend. Maybe Ferrari didn’t have the pace in the last race for whatever reason and now they are back to normal maybe. We will find out in the races to come. What we do know is that the Ferrari has been quick all weekend and we have not really been able to match them.”
But a Mercedes struggling in hot conditions on an abrasive track surface is nothing new. The Silver Arrows locked out the front row in Bahrain last year, but it was Sebastian Vettel’s Ferrari that went on to win the race. The W09, like the W08 before it, is still susceptible to overheating rear tyres, and in Bahrain that can create a series of spiralling problems.
“In the past we always seem to struggle on particular circuits,” – Toto Wolff said, as reported by ESPN – “We struggled in Monaco, we struggled a bit in Budapest and in Singapore. In the years when we had a very strong package, these circuits were our weaknesses. Bahrain was one where we were successful in terms of results in the past but also sometimes it was not trivial to find the right set-up. It’s interesting that the regulation changed, the car is completely different, the tyres change, but it’s a bit of we’re within the DNA of each car to have strengths and weaknesses. And it seems these strengths and weaknesses stay even though everything else changes.”
Keeping the rear tyres from overheating is one of the biggest challenges facing teams in Bahrain. In last year’s race Bottas’ tyre pressures were set to high on the grid with a devastating effect on his race pace as he the temperatures skyrocketed and rear degradation set in. Teams can protect the rear tyres at the desert track by tweaking the setup, but that often comes at a price in terms of one-lap pace.
“This circuit requires a different setup concept for quali and for race distance because here the rear degradation is huge,” Fernando Alonso explained after qualifying his McLaren 13th on the grid. “With this kind of circuit — stop and go, heavy tractions, corners — you need a very strong rear end. But if you have a very strong rear end, then in quali, you are struggling a little bit to rotate the car in the hairpins with the front end missing. So maybe we setup the car a little bit too much towards the race, but it’s not an excuse. We didn’t perform today and hopefully tomorrow we can see a little bit more performance.”
While Mercedes didn’t get that trade off in setup as wrong as McLaren on Saturday night, the W09’s tendency to overheat its rear tyres during the race may have led to a similar approach. Watching a comparison between the Q3 laps of Vettel with Bottas it is clear the Ferrari had a more positive front end and was able to achieve that rotation Alonso talks about. Vettel used that to great effect to gain time in slower corners such as Turn 1 and Turn 10, which is also where the rear tyres can take a battering in the race. In mid-speed corners the Mercedes still had the edge much like it did in Australia and on the straights there was little to choose between the two cars.
But for Sebastian Vettel, who had lacked confidence in the Ferrari’s front end in Australia, a few tweaks in Bahrain made a world of difference.
“I think after the weekend [in Australia], after the race distance, especially when you have so many laps, I think we had a very good understanding and feel [for the car],” Vettel said. “Obviously we’ve been talking about it and looking into it and I think overall I’ve been happier this weekend with how the car has been responding, how the front end was responding. So yeah, overall, I think you also see it in the results but I think the good news is that we are a lot closer in all the conditions, if you look at all the sessions across with everyone so I think that’s the only difference. For the rest it’s the same car as in Australia.”
So while Mercedes appeared to sacrifice some one-lap pace to combat tyre degradation on Sunday, Ferrari found its car’s sweetspot on Saturday evening in Bahrain. As for what it means for the rest of the season — or even Sunday’s grand prix — remains to be seen, but Hamilton suspects it will take a number of races for a true competitive order to emerge.
“You have one race and everybody says you have party mode and all these different things and then you get to the next race and everyone changes their opinion,” he said. “So it will be interesting to see what is written tomorrow and what is written at the next race and the race after that. My view is that it is difficult to find out where you really stand until after a few races. You go through lots of different climates and style of track. But Ferrari have obviously done a great job and their engine is definitely not weaker than ours and they are looking very strong. We’ll see how that is reliability wise, but car wise they are on a par with us and this weekend they are ahead of us. So it may swing race to race, but I can tell you it is going to be a very close championship. We have got a lot of work to do and there is a lot of pressure on all of us — their team and our team and Red Bull — to stay in the fight and maximise every opportunity we get.”
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