The scramble to catch Red Bull – can any F1 team close the gap?

It was a crushing performance, although Red Bull’s chief technical officer Adrian Newey offered a note of caution.

“This car is clearly a close evolution of last year’s,” he told the F1 Nation podcast. “We had a good, detailed look, tried to be critical of its weaknesses, tried to improve on those in lots of small ways.

“And on a sample of one that seems to have worked reasonably well, because it is a sample of one, this circuit has some peculiarities to it.

“So we need to be careful to keep our feet in the ground and keep pushing. But a relief I must admit to get the first one under the belt.”

Newey has been around the block a few times, and he’s right to be cautious. Yes, it was a dominant victory, but as he noted Bahrain is an atypical venue, featuring the oldest track surface on the calendar. Red Bull certainly got everything right – after some reliability and set-up wobbles on Friday – but there are 22 venues to come.

This season will be a development race as teams juggle scarce resources, meaning within the limits of the cost cap and the wind tunnel and CFD allowances that stem from their positions in the aero testing restriction league table, as effectively as they can.

There is still plenty of scope for the pecking order to change, and the big hope for rivals is that RBR’s position at the bottom of the ATR table, with a further 10% penalty on top of that after last year’s cost cap controversy, will rein it in.

There’s another factor which doesn’t relate to hard numbers provided by the regulations and which is much harder for us to quantify – how much scope for development is available within the individual aero concepts chosen by each team as they search week-in, week-out for marginal gains in downforce and efficiency. And that could prove to be the key.

 

Aston Martin 

Fernando Alonso and Aston Martin followed up on the promise of Bahrain testing and free practice as the Spaniard charged to third place. Had he not made a bad start – and been nudged on the first lap by his own team mate – Alonso would have been much further up the road.

He wouldn’t have challenged the Red Bulls, but he probably would have taken the fight to Leclerc had the Ferrari stayed healthy. Crucially despite Alonso’s aggressive approach, the AMR23 was not afflicted by the high levels of tyre deg that hampered Ferrari and Mercedes.

Aston’s leap has come from sheer hard work in the tunnel, helmed by key new recruits Dan Fallows and Eric Blandin, and there’s surely more to come.

“Red Bull seems to have so much more performance than we do in the race so they can manage in the first few laps, and then they start to push. and so that deg is much better. But it the end, we are just slow.”

“Before we draw any conclusion, we need to understand exactly what’s happened,” said new team boss Fred Vasseur. “But overall, I would say that the picture is not the one expected before the race. If I want to summarise the situation, I would say that on the quali pace, we are there, we are matching Red Bull, at least in Bahrain.

“And it was a positive point. Now we have to be fully realistic, if we want to improve, we need to have a clearer picture of the situation. And reliability is not at the level that we need. If we want to win races, we need to have a clean sheet on the weekend, and not small details there and there. And no degradation.”

Vasseur is right to highlight the one-lap pace – Ferrari isn’t going to win races or titles unless it can start at the front – but there’s much work to be done on race form.

On a positive note it’s apparent that many things have been improved over the winter, and a clever tyre call in Q3 and a successful double-stacked pit stop in the race hinted at a more confident organisation in strategic terms. Vasseur is the right guy to keep things calm, but his honeymoon might be short.

 

Mercedes 

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the last couple of weeks is not Aston’s improvement since 2022 but the fact that Mercedes has if anything taken a turn for the worse.

The team ended last season on a high with a victory for George Russell in Brazil after a difficult year with the W13. With rule tweaks aimed at controlling porpoising and all the knowledge gained from trying to get the car to work it seemed logical that that the team would be in a much stronger position from the start of 2023.

However the W14 isn’t up to the job, and after finishing fifth Lewis Hamilton made it clear that podium finisher Alonso was out of his reach.

“We were miles away,” said the former champ. “There was a Ferrari that would’ve been ahead of him, so we would’ve really been sixth. So a podium was nowhere near.

“We have just got a lot of work to do. We have just got to add downforce to the car, we’re lacking a lot of downforce. That is really where the time will come. As soon as we put more load on the rear and the front we’ll pick up that pace.”

Race form was a strength of Mercedes last year, and the fact that the team suffered badly with degradation in Bahrain should be a red flag – although to be fair it was one of the trickiest races for the W13 in 2022, so it might not be such an issue at future venues.

Even before the race Toto Wolff was admitting that the team had got its concept wrong, and that there is little to be gained by pursuing the current route. That begs the question why didn’t the team realise that sooner and change tack?

McLaren did just that in September when the team realised that the 15mm floor edge rise had hurt more than expected, and that the original aero concept would have limited potential. It was a bit late to try something different, but the Woking outfit opted to. It’s made for a painful start to the season with an unrepresentative car, and the results will be seen in Baku.

At the W14 launch Wolff indicated that a revised sidepod package was already in the works. It remains to be seen how much of a change in fortunes that will bring with it.

“We’ve looked at other ideas and haven’t stood still,” said the Austrian. “And that’s not only since two weeks when we saw that we haven’t been able to close the gap. But we’ve done it since a while just to be open-minded. And still with an emphasis on making this work, obviously. We’ve already looked at different concepts.”

“I think at the end, I don’t think we’re constrained by the budget cap, because we just need to decide where we want the development direction to go, and then put all our efforts into it.

“You’re not going to develop two cars side-by-side, you’re going to develop one, and we will decide that in the next days and weeks which car that will be.”

Mercedes has the capability to improve over a season, as we saw last year. The team has more wind tunnel time than both Red Bull and Ferrari, but the cost cap is the same hard buffer that is for everyone else, and despite Wolff downplaying the subject a concept change will eat into those scarce resources.

And the other factor is time – while the W14 may become quicker relative to the main competition, like last year it may not happen until late in the season.