BLOOMINGTON, Minn. — Lewis Hamilton headed into the beginning of the Formula 1 season in a wary mood because his Mercedes was not the fastest car during testing.
“We’ve got through our test program,” he said at the conclusion of testing in Bahrain when asked what sort of shape the team was in. “We’ve had decent reliability, which has been a positive. I think everyone is struggling out on this bumpy track and we come out of it knowing that we have a lot of work to do.”
Did he have an underlying confidence?
“There’s a confidence that we can always work through whatever problem we’re facing, yes,” he replied. “We’re not the quickest at the moment. Ferrari looks to be the quickest and perhaps Red Bull, and then maybe us or McLaren. I don’t know, but we’re certainly not at the top.”
Twelve months ago, Bahrain turned out to be a tricky test for Mercedes and the team turned things around. Does the situation feel similar?
“No, it feels a lot different,” Hamilton said. “It’s not as good, I don’t think it’s going to look as it did last year with the difficult session we had in practice and then switch over into the race. I think we have far bigger challenges this time and there are not one-week turnarounds, they’ll take a little bit longer. But from what I have been told, we have a considerable amount of pace to find.”
Does Hamilton have concerns about the ability to fight for the title?
“Obviously, it’s a little bit too early to get into that, or have those kinds of thoughts,” he said, “but at the moment I don’t think we’ll be competing for wins. But there is potential within our car to get us there. We’ve just got to learn to extract it and fix some of the problems. That’s what we are working on and everyone is doing an incredible job back at the factory working as hard as they can, but we have some hurdles to overcome. Obviously, next week (the Bahrain Grand Prix), we’ll get a much better showing of our pace, but I think people will be surprised maybe. People keep saying that we keep talking ourselves down but it’s a bit different this year.”
The radical technical rule changes have resulted in the teams coming up with different interpretations in car design.
“I think it’s interesting. It’s very innovative of what Mercedes has come up with,” Red Bull team principal Christian Horner noted. “It’s quite a different concept to the concept that we pursued and some of the others have (pursued). It shows the creativity even within constrictive regulations in F-1, that very different solutions are coming out. Whether it’s the right route or whatever, only time will tell.
“What we see in F-1, there tends to be convergence over a period of time on design philosophies. But what’s so good about this sport is you get a clean sheet of paper; you get 10 different interpretations. Mercedes has come up with an extreme one that’s a different interpretation. To answer your next question of whether we think it’s illegal or not, yes absolutely, it looks like it ticks all the boxes.”
Does it comply with the spirit of the regulations?
“There’s not really anything that defines the spirit of the regulations, it either complies or it doesn’t,” Horner said. “It’s not really for us to judge, the FIA has the access to all the drawings, a design like that surely would’ve been submitted in advance. It’s an interesting concept. It’s a radical concept. Is it quick or not? Only time will tell but in terms of its compliance. That’s very much an FIA matter.
“There’s been rumors of fairly radical interpretations,” Horner continued. “Obviously, visually the Mercedes is quite a departure from the concepts that certainly we’ve taken and quite a few other teams have taken. That doesn’t mean to say it’s naturally better or worse. It’s just a different interpretation, of course there’s compromises that have been made with their layout to accommodate that. It’s impossible to draw any conclusions other than, obviously, it looks very different.
“For me, the car that looks the most settled on the circuit at the moment is Ferrari,” Horner added. “I think they’ve had a very strong testing period so far both in Barcelona and in Bahrain. So I would say they’ve looked extremely competitive whenever they’ve been on track. You have to remember that these cars are still very immature, the rate of development will be fast and intense. I expect that to change and Mercedes is going to be a huge factor in this championship. I have no doubt.”