It’s only Friday but at Imola the Mercedes was working way better than around Bahrain.
It was keeping its tyres in the sweet spot, there weren’t any of the sort of combination corners that troubled its front end at Sakhir – and hence its available set-up window was wide enough to tune it nicely into the track.
Couple that with a very disjointed couple of sessions for Red Bull and the competitive picture was convincingly inverted as Valtteri Bottas led a Mercedes 1-2 in both practices.
“It’s a bit of both,” answered Hamilton to the question of whether it was car improvement or a circuit-specific.
“There’s been a bit of car improvement, but track comes a bit to us. So far the car’s in a good place, the tyres are working really well.
“But I don’t think we’ve seen the best of the Red Bulls yet. It looked like they had quite messy sessions.”
Indeed they did. Sergio Perez lost half of the morning session to his collision with a cruising Esteban Ocon while Max Verstappen was out of FP2 very early with a broken driveshaft before setting either a truly representative hot lap or any long running.
But even prior to Verstappen’s problem, the Mercs appeared to have a small edge in outright pace. Verstappen had just set his 1m16.999s on new medium tyres when the problem arose. At much the same time Hamilton and Bottas were in the high-1m16s on the same medium tyres, though they subsequently improved a lot during those runs – with Bottas eventually peaking out at a session-topping 1m 15.531s.
Hamilton reckoned the cooler temperatures of Italy in April compared to Bahrain three weeks ago definitely helped their cause. “When it’s this cool the tyres don’t overheat from entry to middle to exit like they did there. Here you’re in a nice sweet spot.”
If there was some glimmer of hope for Red Bull it was that the Merc – not for the first time in recent history – did not appear to be finding as much of the soft tyre’s extra grip as most other cars. Bottas didn’t improve on his C3 medium-tyred time when he tried the C4 soft, while Hamilton was just 0.1s faster on the soft than he’d been on the medium – but still marginally slower than Bottas.
But we’re probably not comparing like with like here as Mercedes was making power calibrations between the two runs, so that rather skewed the picture.
The expectation is that Mercedes will find around 0.5s – which may still offer Red Bull a window of opportunity. That gap should enable both Mercedes and Red Bull to comfortably get through Q2 on the mediums and thus avoid running the soft on race day altogether in what will be a one-stop race barring safety cars.
The other factor that may give Red Bull cheer is that although the Mercedes were fastest, their advantage over cars that Red Bull would be expected to comfortably out-perform was small.
Pierre Gasly’s AlphaTauri set the third-fastest time of the afternoon with a lap that was less than a tenth adrift of Bottas. Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari actually set a faster time than either Mercedes – but it was disallowed for track limit infringement (10cm over the line at Piratella). Carlos Sainz’s legal time was only a couple of tenths adrift of Bottas’ time.
Yes, Ferrari does tend to run this Friday session lighter than Red Bull or Mercedes, but even so, the Mercedes’ advantage was small.
To put this into a more realistic light than just a laptime comparison can, Gasly was taking 0.55s per lap out of the Mercedes cars on the straights. Leclerc was taking 0.3s. So the likelihood is that the Honda and Ferrari power units were being run more aggressively today than the Mercedes ones.
Even so, in Bahrain Verstappen’s Red Bull qualified 0.9s faster than AlphaTauri and 0.7s faster than Ferrari. So although Mercedes is sure to find a lot more pace on Saturday it’s a bit premature to go with it definitely being quicker than Red Bull here.
Both Bottas and Hamilton interrupted their long runs for a balance change to keep the understeer at bay hence the runs weren’t exactly ‘long’. But for what it’s worth here’s how they compared.
LONG RUNS
Bottas
5 laps – medium – 1m19.613s average
Hamilton
4 laps – medium – 1m19.759s
Leclerc
7 laps – medium – 1m19.856s
Perez
8 laps – medium – 1m20.008s
Sainz
11 laps – soft – 1m20.252s
Gasly
8 laps – soft – 1m20.252s
Tsunoda
7 laps – soft – 1m20.253s
FP2 Fastest times
1 Bottas Mercedes 1m15.551s
2 Hamilton Mercedes 1m15.561s
3 Gasly AlphaTauri 1m15.629s
4 Sainz Ferrari 1m15.834s
5 Leclerc Ferrari 1m16.371 (1m15.387s DQ)
6 Perez Red Bull 1m16.411s
7 Tsunoda AlphaTauri 1m16.419s
8 Norris McLaren 1m16.485s
9 Giovinazzi Alfa Romeo 1m16.513s
10 Stroll Aston Martin 1m16.737s
11 Ocon Alpine 1m16.817s
12 Latifi Williams 1m16.823s
13 Alonso Alpine 1m16.835s
14 Verstappen Red Bull 1m16.999s
15 Vettel Aston Martin 1m17.092s
16 Russell Williams 1m17.179s
17 Raikkonen Alfa Romeo 1m17.273s
18 Ricciardo McLaren 1m17.273s (1m16.782s DQ)
19 Schumacher Haas 1m17.350s
20 Mazepin Haas 1m17.857s
