While leading the Chinese Grand Prix, Lewis Hamilton often lapped a full second a lap quicker than any other car – he started from the pole and led every single lap to win his third consecutive race of the season. With his teammate Nico Rosberg taking the victory in the season opener, the works Mercedes team had a lockout on the top step of the podium in the first four races of the season.
“This team is on a roll that’s for sure,” Hamilton says. “The team has done a great job. We’re going to keep pushing; we’re going to keep moving forwards. That’s what Mercedes-Benz wants to do. They want to keep moving forward, developing, hopefully improving the engine and also the car. We’re going to keep working hard because obviously the others are pushing to catch us up. So I hope it continues.”
From day one in preseason testing, Mercedes has been a step ahead of the other teams. The new rules this year called for a completely different powertrain with a turbocharged 1.6-litre V6 hybrid engine with two energy recovery systems replacing the normally-aspirated 2.4-litre V8s used previously.
From the outset it was obvious Mercedes had created a better power unit than rival manufacturers Renault and Ferrari. Furthermore, by being able to integrate the chassis, power unit and all the auxiliary things, such as the radiators, the Mercedes team was able to create a better overall car than its customer teams (Williams, McLaren and Force India) who had to fit the supplied power unit into their cars.
“The Mercedes power unit is designed in close collaboration with Bob Bell, the technical director (of Mercedes), and has been right from the release of the regulations,” Andy Cowell, the managing director of Mercedes High Performance Powertrains says. “Every nut, bolt, washer and cable routing is designed around this car. That provides an advantage.”
The result?
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“This is the best car I’ve ever had,” Hamilton declares of his Mercedes F1 W05. “It is not just the downforce, but it is a combination of things. It is the way you are able to set it up; it is the technology that is on the car. It is the engineers and mechanics, it is everything. It is just collectively a really put together package. I keep a close eye on all the cars I drive and how it is built and how they come together. I am really impressed with how the engineers have packaged this car. Every team does it, but how they squeeze all these components in, how the mechanics take the engine off and they have to unplug god knows how many leads, and put it back on exactly the same without faltering. It is fascinating.”
Red Bull and Sebastian Vettel won the constructors’ and drivers’ world championships for the past four years, but the Renault-powered team has been a step or two behind this season. Red Bull’s RB10 chassis is probably actually better than the Mercedes W05, but the Renault power unit is not as good as Mercedes’.
“It’s been a big challenge,” Vettel says, “and not so much what people expect in terms of results. I’m not quite where I want to be in terms of how I feel inside the car. Then again, we’ve had a lot of changes and there’s a lot of new stuff to adapt to, so obviously we are still learning with the car which is the still the biggest challenge.”Daniel Ricciardo, who replaced Mark Webber as Vettel’s teammate, has actually been outpacing the four-time champion.
“Sebastian is having a tough time at the moment because he hasn’t got that feeling from the car that he is looking for,” Red Bull team principal Christian Horner observes. “He’s tremendously sensitive to certain aspects of the set-up and he’s not getting the feedback from the car that he wants.
“The compound effect of that is that he’s damaging the tire more, which is very unusual for Seb, as we’ve seen since the Pirellis were introduced. It’s highly unusual for him to be going through the tire life quicker than the average. That’s just the culmination of the issues he’s currently got and as soon as we’ve worked those out, he will be back with a bang.”
Ferrari, too, has been struggling with its car – called the F14T – but the ever tenacious Fernando Alonso is not giving up.
“Well, of course it is a priority, we need to close, we need to catch them as soon as possible before the championship is over,” he says of Mercedes. “We need to keep scoring points, as many as we can now that we are not super-competitive, try not to lose too much ground on points in the championship, and if in one race we become as competitive as them, try to catch up in terms of points.
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“It seems very far away because they have a big advantage and we need to work really hard if we want to have that possibility. There is nothing really special we can do, just don’t give up. There’s still a long way go but being super-realistic, knowing that the gap is very, very big it’s going to be very tough. We will give 100 percent and we will fight.”
To make things worse at Ferrari, Kimi Raikkonen has been struggling to get to grips with his car.
“My view is that it’s probably more to do with driving style,” he says. “I don’t think I work the tires very hard. When you have a new tire it works well until the grip from the new tires goes away and then you struggle and you have to go slower and the tires cool down more – everything goes round and round and you cannot fix that. It’s a thing that everybody hates, but there is not a magic thing and I cannot necessarily change everything with my driving.”
Lotus had the second fastest car behind the Red Bull at the end of last season, but this year the team has been way off the pace with its Renault-powered E22 chassis and the car has suffered a host of reliability woes as well.“We are about level with Toro Rosso for pace,” Lotus technical director Nick Chester says. “We’ve got a lot more to learn about the E22 than the other teams. We learn something every time the car takes to the track.”
Kevin Magnussen and Jenson Button finished second and third in the season opener in Australia, but they have been struggling with getting the speed out of the McLaren-Mercedes MP4-29.
“The weaker part of our car is high-speed corners,” Button observes. “Our strengths are more in low-speed corners. That showed in Australia and in testing. High speed is an area where we do need to improve.”
While it needs upgrades, the MP4-29 was not born bad like last year’s car.
“We went for a car that was drivable, and a car that we could understand the through-corner balance,” Button explains. “We knew that initially, at the start of the year, the car was probably going to be a little bit down on downforce. I don’t think we expected to be this far behind Mercedes.”
Back in 1988 the McLaren-Honda team nearly won every one of the season’s 16 races with its drivers Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna. If Jean-Louis Schlesser had not managed to fumble things while being lapped by leader Senna and knock the McLaren out of the race then the team indeed would have become the first to win every race in a F1 season.
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Could Mercedes win all 19 races this year? The other teams will catch up, but whether they can close the gap enough to obliterate Mercedes the way Mercedes annihilated them in the opening races of 2014 remains to be seen. One ray of hope for the rival teams is that the Mercedes has not had bulletproof reliability.
Still, the championship battle is likely to come down to a duel between Hamilton and Rosberg.
Rosberg, incidentally, has not invited Hamilton to his wedding. They are the “best friends” of any teammate duo on the grid, but are not close friends.
“Nico and me, as everyone, can count our friends on one hand,” Hamilton says. “And Nico does not come in those five friends that I have, and I don’t come in the five friends that he has.
“We are colleagues. We have known each other for a long time, probably longer than any of the other drivers. We have a great amount of respect and a great working relationship. We have raced since we were kids.”
Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff has admitted that tensions will rise as the championship battle heats up between his duo driving the mighty Mercs.
