Will the remaining circuits in the 2021 Formula 1 title fight be more suited to Red Bull or Mercedes?
That’s a question fans and journalists have been asking pretty much all year long in this remarkably close title fight.
And the answers have tended to be a surprise, with past form or expectations of cars’ strengths proving to be unreliable guides.
But in this week’s episode of The Race F1 Podcast – which assesses the factors that might decide the championship – Mark Hughes had a gallant attempt to predict whether it’ll be Mercedes or Red Bull setting the pace at Jeddah and Yas Marina:
The Saudi Arabia circuit looks tailor-made for a low-drag car – which the Mercedes is, certainly lower drag than the Red Bull.
Some of those corners look flat-out. If it’s a flat-out corner you don’t get paid back for any downforce advantage that you might have, you’re just faster through those corners because the car just sees them as a straight.
So perhaps on paper, that looks like it favours Mercedes a little bit.
But it just needs the surface to be not quite right for how the Mercedes works the front tyres, or for the Red Bull to be working well or for one of the slow corners to turn out to be a key one – and Red Bull can suddenly do a different set-up and switch itself on.
Abu Dhabi is somewhere they’ve both been good in the past. That looks very, very evenly matched. You’ve got the flowing first sector, then the very street-circuit-like final sector. Logically that last sector is Red Bull territory.
It’s impossible to say how the changes to the Yas Marina track layout would affect the balance between the two cars because it’s so delicately poised anyway. But the changes that they’ve made to the circuit do look good in terms of getting some better racing.
Ultimately I don’t think anything’s cast in stone this year between those two cars. On an initial cursory look, you’d say Saudi favours Mercedes but in Abu Dhabi, they’ll be very equal.
