Mercedes confirms Ferrari’s fears
The suspicions of Charles Leclerc, expressed at the end of Friday’s free practice, have thus proven well-founded: the performance advantage of Mercedes is much wider than could have been predicted by analyzing the data from the winter tests in Bahrain. In the qualifying for the Australian GP, the first of the year on the fast street circuit of Melbourne, George Russell and Andrea Kimi Antonelli strolled past all their rivals, inflicting gaps that hadn’t been seen in Formula 1 for ten years. And while the specter of a new Silver Arrows dominance, like the one that characterized the early seasons of the turbo-hybrid engine era, appears before the fans, the Monegasque from Ferrari seems to harbor almost the same pessimism…
Read more The unequivocal data of Mercedes’ dominance in the Melbourne qualifying
Charles Leclerc’s pessimism
Leclerc in fact finished qualifying with the fourth fastest time, also behind the Red Bull of the surprising Isack Hadjar (“It was impressive for his first qualifying with the new team, congratulations because he deserves it and today he did better than us”) with a gap of over eight tenths from pole-sitter Russell, on a track where, moreover, laps are completed in less than 80 seconds. A gap that, interviewed by Sky, the Monegasque driver himself admitted was particularly disappointing, then increasing the dose of low optimism about the chances of recovering to the microphones of the French journalists of Canal+: “As far as the Mercedes are concerned, I don’t think there’s much to be done for now. The gap is huge”.
A phrase that leaves little room for interpretation, despite expectations – and this was one of Frederic Vasseur‘s winter mantras – that it will be mostly the evolutions of the current cars and power units that determine the course of the season, without forgetting that from June onwards there will be new hot measurements on the compression ratio that could partly change the balance of Formula 1. For the moment, the Monegasque remains quite disappointed, so much so that he does not believe that Ferrari’s much-discussed advantage at the start will be able to change things. “Mercedes takes a bit more time than us to find the right window at the start, but we are not counting on this to win tomorrow’s race. I am more or less sure that they will manage to start well and that there won’t be a big difference at the start”, concludes Charles Leclerc.
