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At this stage of the Imola weekend we hadn’t really seen a direct comparison between Red Bull and Mercedes. This time around in Portimao we have a more reasonable data breakdown between them – and it’s close.
The Red Bull is definitively quicker through the circuit’s faster corners, the advantage lies with Mercedes in the slower turns. How that all plays out over the lap is smaller than the difference between a good lap and a very good lap – so everything looks up for grabs.
At this point, late afternoon Friday, Mercedes appears to have a slight edge. But not by enough to really predict anything on a gripless track so volatile in its temperature and wind.
Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes was fastest over a single lap by 0.143s from Max Verstappen’s heavily upgraded Red Bull, though neither of them felt their laps were great.
Valtteri Bottas was quickest on the medium-tyre long runs by an average of a couple of tenths per lap over the Red Bulls of Sergio Perez and Verstappen, setting an almost identical race sim pace. Verstappen’s early running in the session was compromised by a brake-by-wire sensor failure, disrupting his run programme somewhat – making for a worrying reliability concern for the weekend.
Although the track was much warmer than in the race here of last October and the surface has had six months to mature, there was still a general low level of grip for everyone and the wind remained very gusty, pushing the cars on at Turn 1 and 14 in particular. This, the heavier Pirellis and the aero regulation changes contributed to times that were 2s slower than in the same session last year.
The gap between Mercedes/Red Bull and the rest was similarly small to Imola – though race day there seemed to confirm that the top two teams tend to run heavier than the others on Friday, as the gap on the Sunday was as big as usual. For what it’s worth, Carlos Sainz’s Ferrari was best of the rest here over a single lap in fourth overall, on the same tenth as Bottas. Alpine’s Fernando Alonso and Esteban Ocon were a somewhat surprising fifth and sixth.
Assuming the Mercedes/Red Bull fuel loads are roughly equivalent (the pattern of the opening two weekends would suggest as much), the educated estimate from those teams is that Ferrari is running around 10kg lighter, Alpine around 30kg lighter – and McLaren around the same as Mercedes/Red Bull.
These are ifs – but reasonable ones. If we calculate on that basis, the performance order on Friday behind Mercedes/Red Bull would seem to be: Ferrari +0.7s, McLaren +0.9s, AlphaTauri +1.0s (all gaps relative to Merc/Red Bull) – with Alpine in reality probably in its usual place, vying with Aston Martin in the Q2/Q3 cut-off.
Bottas, who had been quickest in the cooler morning practice (a few hundredths ahead of Verstappen), was not enjoying the behaviour of the Mercedes on the soft tyre as the track temperatures came up in the afternoon.
“For me, the softer the compound the trickier it got,” he said.
“The rear of the car is pretty loose in places. But on the harder tyre getting it up to temperature takes a time. Getting the temperatures right is quite a high priority for us going into qualifying. I think whoever finds the most laptime overnight between us and Red Bull will be on pole tomorrow.”
“In my opinion the tyres brought here are a step too hard,” said Hamilton. “But it’s the same for everyone. Everyone was struggling out there.
“It’s difficult to say if we were more affected but it was definitely a real challenge keeping the car on the track. The track didn’t really evolve because it got hotter and windier into the afternoon, so we’re working on the balance and the tyres but it’s difficult to know where we are [relative] to Red Bull.”
The team’s engineering chief Andrew Shovlin revealed that damage had been found on both cars after the afternoon session.
“That will have been costing some performance and will certainly explain some of Lewis’s issues on the long run but even with that corrected, we could do with finding a bit more pace,” he said.
The one-lap pace difference between the medium and soft was very small, just as it was last year when Mercedes actually set pole with a three-lap run in Q3 on the medium. So it’s quite possible that more than just Mercedes and Red Bull will attempt to get through Q2 on the medium.
The low degradation rate of the track strongly suggests a one-stop race. Some of those leading midfield runners may fancy the faster warm-up of the soft giving them track position in the early laps (recall the sensational first laps last year of Sainz and Raikkonen on the softs).
Verstappen’s delay meant we saw only medium-tyred long runs from Red Bull – allowing Bottas and Hamilton to be comfortably fastest on the soft-tyred runs (around 0.7s faster than Sainz’s Ferrari). But it’s the medium-tyred long runs which were more important – as both Mercedes and Red Bull will be looking to start the race on them.
Fourth-fastest Hamilton trailed in this comparison but not too much should be read into that as he and Bottas were back-to-backing two opposing approaches – with Bottas pushing relatively hard early in the stint, Hamilton bringing the tyres in more gently. The approach chosen by the team for Bottas proved faster over the small number of laps they did.
Some way behind the top four, Sainz’s Ferrari and Daniel Ricciardo’s McLaren were very closely-matched as best of the rest. The latter appears to have made something of a breakthrough this weekend, reporting that he’d tried what he’d considered a radical technique in the simulator with the car and put it into practice here – to good effect.
MEDIUM-TYRED LONG RUNS
1. Bottas 1m23.241s (5 laps)
2. Perez 1m23.455s (7 laps)
3. Verstappen 1m23.472s (9 laps)
4. Hamilton 1m23.976s (7 laps)
OVERALL FASTEST TIMES FP2
1. Hamilton Mercedes 1m19.837s
2. Verstappen Red Bull 1m19.980s
3. Bottas Mercedes 1m20.181s
4. Sainz Ferrari 1m20.197s
5. Alonso Alpine 1m20.220s
6. Ocon Alpine 1m20.235s
7. Leclerc Ferrari 1m20.360s
8. Ricciardo McLaren 1m20.180s
9. Stroll Aston Martin 1m20.427s
10. Perez Red Bull 1m20.516s
11. Gasly AlphaTauri 1m20.558s
12. Norris McLaren 1m20.757s
13. Russell Williams 1m20.976s
14. Tsunoda AlphaTauri 1m21.053s
15. Vettel Aston Martin 1m21.074s
16. Raikkonen Alfa Romeo 1m21.225s
17. Giovinazzi Alfa Romeo 1m21.238s
18. Schumacher Haas 1m21.537s
19. Latifi Williams 1m21.855s
20. Mazepin Haas 1m22.638s
