F1 Talk: Mercedes Make 1-2 history, but has Bottas Earned the Hype

Bulletproof, impeccable, simply perfect. Those are just some of the superlatives that you have to use when talking about the start to the 2019 Formula One season for Mercedes. This is the 70th F1 season, yet Mercedes have achieved something remarkable and perhaps something that was unthinkable during winter testing – four consecutive 1-2 finishes to start 2019. A first.

Valtteri Bottas took an impressive pole position and just had enough pace to beat teammate, Lewis Hamilton, by a few seconds.

Was the damage done on Saturday? I don’t think so. Hamilton got the better start on Sunday and was alongside Bottas through turns one and two. He then tucked in behind to take the slipstream towards turn four but Bottas covered the line and outbraked Hamilton to hold the lead. Some may think Hamilton was “too nice” to his Finnish teammate. I think not.

You really do not want to do anything stupid when you have locked out the front row, especially with a potential chaotic race coming up anyway. Both drivers gave each other plenty of racing room and respect and for Hamilton he knows how to play the long game.

Hamilton does not need to get on the wrong side of his teammate or his team when he knows he is in the box seat for a 6th world championship. If Ferrari can come back at Mercedes, he may need Bottas later in the year so minimising the risks and playing it cautious is not necessarily a bad thing.

Also, if it gets to the point where it is just Bottas vs. Hamilton for the title then Hamilton knows he can up his game and reel off 4, 5, 6 victories in a row when needed. Remember, this is a guy who ignored the team and held up Nico Rosberg in Abu Dhabi 2016 to try and let other drivers overtake Rosberg to give Hamilton the championship. He still wants to win badly and you just feel that once Hamilton gets a really good feel of the car and the tyres, he can consistently outpace Bottas.

Lets not forget, Bottas had an excellent start to the year in 2018 and all this talk of “a new Bottas” and joking with “the beard is making him fast” I actually find nonsense. I don’t think Bottas is better at all this year.

Last year, he was very unlucky in Shanghai and Baku to not win the races, especially Shanghai. Add to the fact that last year he crashed in Melbourne qualifying and only picked up a few points in the race compared to not crashing so far this year and not having any bad luck whatsoever, then it explains why he has scored so many more points in 2019 versus 2018.

Bottas was generally faster than Hamilton this time last year as well before dropping away dramatically as the season went on. He had had very similar pace this year, just without the bad luck. That is all.

Bottas’s main weakness is that he has many races were he just lacks pace. It has already happened this year in Bahrain, he would have finished 30+ seconds behind Hamilton if the race did not end under a safety car. More races like that will happen for Bottas and that is where Hamilton will inevitably take points away from Bottas. Right now, Hamilton is focusing on taking points away from Ferrari and Verstappen.

Anyway, more on a potential Hamilton vs. Bottas title fight in another article, there was a race on Sunday.

Hamilton did pressurise Bottas at times, getting within DRS range towards the end of the lap and you can’t help but feel that he was a little bit faster. To be fair to Bottas, he made no mistakes and as a driver that would have been a very satisfying race.

He was under pressure all race long from a 5-time champion on a track which very much punishes any kind of minor misjudgement. It was pretty tense just watching and the intensity was quite high at times but Hamilton never really got close.

Bottas now leads the championship by one point but can he keep up the good form and can he match Hamilton when he starts to find the groove and finds his top form.

On another track where “Ferrari were meant to be the team to beat” but it all went wrong when it mattered most.

Charles Leclerc led all the practice sessions and was the man to beat going into qualifying. It was going to the form book really as Leclerc has gone extremely well in Baku in the past two years in F1 and F2. Ferrari were over a second clear from Mercedes in the final practice session, a huge margin but somehow Mercedes clawed the margin back and some.

I half-heartedly joked in my Baku Preview that no matter how far Mercedes are behind in practice, they will lock out the front row by a few tenths. They did. It was in part due to the crash of Leclerc in Q2 which aided the front row lockout.

Robert Kubica had already crashed in the Williams in Q1 at the tricky “castle section” – it is only 7.6M wide remember. Leclerc was on medium tyres so did not have the same grip he would have had on the soft tyres. He locked up and had a split second to either try and somehow make the corner or bail out of it and go down the escape road. Leclerc chose to try and make the corner.

He made the wrong choice and headed straight for the wall is the car couldn’t handle the speed he took. It was a devastating blow, not just for him and Ferrari but for us because it would have been great to see him take the fight to Mercedes on a track he adores.

Both red flags in qualifying took around 30 minutes to clear up so the track temperatures dropped a lot which played into the hands of Mercedes massively. With the sun already set, the pendulum swung towards the Silver Arrows and with Ferrari’s best man out (no disrespect to Sebastian Vettel but Leclerc had the edge on him throughout the weekend) Mercedes were there to take advantage.

In the race, Vettel was not miles behind, but just like China you can’t help but feel Mercedes were not going all out, with Hamilton and Bottas just controlling things by turning their engines down a little mid-race and saving their tyres for the end of the Grand Prix.

Max Verstappen was in a similar position to Vettel but seemed more impressive. That Red Bull should really be in no man’s land but Verstappen has got the absolute maximum out of it and was right with Vettel and the Mercedes.

Annoyingly, a virtual safety car stopped his momentum and with these really annoying and quite stupid Pirelli tyres, Verstappen lost all pace after the restart. You can have the exact same setup, the exact same conditions, the exact same engine settings, drive the same way but even a VSC means that the tyres react so differently and all of a sudden Verstappen is one second slower.

That is not how it should be at all. We can talk about the front wings, aerodynamics, bardgeboards, inwash, outwash whatever but these tyres have so much importance and so much emphasis on laptime that hardly any of that matters now and it is all about who can luck into making the tyres switch on. Quite frankly I find it pathetic.

In pretty much no other motorsport series do you hear so much tyre talk and that is because it isn’t a problem. But in F1, the pinnacle of motorsport it is a massive problem because there is far, far too much emphasis on the tyres which has never been the case until the last 2-3 years.

Pierre Gasly had an unfortunate weekend as he was forced to start from the pitlane after failing to stop at the weighbridge in practice two and then the team did a pitstop and didn’t push Gasly back to the weighbridge. It is a clear-cut penalty and whether starting from the pitlane is a fair penalty or not I’m not sure.

People will argue “it happened in practice, why is he even getting penalised.” Well, practice can on rare occasions set the grid for the race if qualifying is abandoned for whatever reason. You have to treat practice sessions, like it is a qualifying session – from a steward’s point of view. A precedent has been set and as long as the stewards are now consistent then I think Gasly’s penalty is fair.

In the race, the Frenchman was going very well and showing the best pace he has had all year. But then, he suffered a driveshaft failure. This was by far Gasly’s best weekend in 2019 and he now just needs to have no bad luck and execute a solid performance.

There was plenty going on in the midfield, as always, even though the TV director was yet again very poor and I promise we will have two articles solely on the midfield story so far next week right here on Motorsport.radio.

In my latest Driver Ratings article I have touched on the incredible performance from Sergio Perez who continues to impress and discussed the Daniel Ricciardo reversing into Daniil Kvyat incident.

Before this article turns into a rant I end by saying huge congratulations for the slick, dedicated and efficient Mercedes operation that has gone from strength to strength in recent months. Superlatives are not enough to understand the mega job they have done.

The most consecutive 1-2 finishes at any point in a season is five, this has been done on four occasions – 1952 (Ferrari), 2002 (Ferrari), 2014 (Mercedes), 2015-16 (Mercedes). Can Mercedes make it five and can they go one step further and create yet more history? We will find out in Spain and Monaco but one thing for sure is that the constructors’ championship looks in safe hands which is what the team want to win the most.