Have Mercedes upgrades really put it ahead of Red Bull? - MPH

The pattern of performance between Mercedes and Red Bull-Honda over the half-season lends itself to several different interpretations. Certainly, the two teams themselves have frequently been surprised at the way the swings between them have worked out at different tracks.

There are reasons driving the anomalies – the sensitivity of the tyres to track temperatures and the difficulty of finding their sweet spot, two very different concept of cars with contrasting traits in terms of set up options and tyre usage – but they only matter because the two cars are fundamentally fairly close on performance. In recent seasons, an unfavourable combination of demands for Mercedes would simply reduce the margin of its superiority rather than put it behind another car. This season the constantly shifting relative importance of the driving factors is being made more visible by changing the colour of the car at the front.

The Mercedes was definitely behind and playing catch-up on pure performance at the opening round in Bahrain. At Imola it was closer to the Red Bull – only errors by both Red Bull drivers in Q3 prevented them locking-out the front row – but the Merc’s inability to generate temperature in its front tyres quickly enough always gave Max Verstappen a nice cushion to work with, once he’d muscled his way past Lewis Hamilton at the start. In the five laps it took for the Merc to get its tyres working, Verstappen was 5sec up the road.

In Portugal the two cars were extremely closely-matched, the Mercedes with a possible small edge. It was keeping its front tyres nicely cool through the hairpin/long looping corner onto the straight, enabling Hamilton stay close enough to Verstappen down the pit straight to be able to make a DRS pass, something Verstappen was unable to do when behind the Merc. It wasn’t a straightline performance advantage – their speed traces were virtually identical when they each set their fastest laps – it was an advantage when running behind another car.

In Barcelona the Mercedes had much the better tyre usage on race day, trapping Verstappen into Merc’s two-stop trap.

So Merc had started the season behind, gradually drawn closer and then got in front. Which might be interpreted as the team making progress. But it just as easily could have been track traits and if the sequence of venues up to this point had run in reverse order, might we have seen a pattern of Mercedes starting in front but falling steadily further behind?

Monaco was the first track where maximum downforce was needed – where how much raw downforce could be loaded onto the car would determine which was the faster. Red Bull comfortably aced that contest, the Mercedes further troubled (again) by its reluctance to get its front tyres quickly up to temperature. In Baku Mercedes only got itself into qualifying contention by using a much smaller rear wing than was optimal for the race and Red Bull’s bigger-winged performance advantage – the way it could still have good tyre performance at the end of the stint – was easily going to convert into a Verstappen victory, until the exploding tyre chaos.