Mercedes says there is “a long journey ahead” to understand why its car seemingly lacked performance at pre-season testing in Bahrain last weekend.
The reigning World Champions endured a difficult three days of running, with its drivers Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas experiencing a number of off-track excursions.
Following the final day of running on Sunday, the team stated that its rival Red Bull had the faster car while also voicing distress over both high and low-fuel pace.
In the latest F1 Debrief video from Mercedes, the team was asked about the car’s unstable rear end, which its Strategy Director James Vowles says is an area it needs to explore further.
“We are fortunate enough to have a lot of footage available to us, as you are at home as well, and it was pretty evident from that, that the car was handling poorly,” Vowles said.
“Conversely the Red Bull looked what we would call planted, but it was a very stable car especially through the last sector of the lap.
“And I think that’s a fair observation, it was visible to the outside and I would say the lap times mirrored that as well.
“But it’s also fair to say that we don’t have answers as we are sat here now, it is just 24 hours after the end of the test. Huge amounts of data available to us and now a long journey ahead to try and understand what was causing that.”
Mercedes has charged to seven consecutive double Championships since the start of the turbo-hybrid era, with its biggest challenge coming in 2017 and 2018 from Ferrari.
While Mercedes was dominant in 2019 and 2020, the team expects a much closer title fight this year against Red Bull.
“I would say Red Bull are ahead on performance, they are the class act from the test, but it is a test, it is not a race and it is one event out of 23,” Vowles said.
“Are we going to have a close season? I would say so. Red Bull are a fierce adversary, they’ve got a strong package and clearly came out of the box very, very quick.
“The result of that is across the season and across different types of track layouts, I am sure you will see us move forwards and backwards relative to them but I don’t believe we are going into this particularly finding all the performance that is missing or being ahead of them.
“So, in short: yeah, I think we are going to have a close championship this year.”
