By akademiotoelektronik, 11/05/2022

Mercedes F1 says Red Bull has now taken the lead

Mercedes have lost their edge this season due, in part, to changes to aero regulations that have hampered the defending champions but also because their challenger has made some good improvements.

Red Bull, which has now won four races to Mercedes' three this year, has also had a very powerful new Honda engine since the start of the season. And it has progressed further in France, with version 2.

When asked if Red Bull had taken a step forward to the point of overtaking, Mercedes director of track engineering Andrew Shovlin conceded: "Yeah, they seem to have."

"They are very quick on the straights, but I think the way we see it is that our team, at their best, can beat Red Bull. In the end, we saw the opportunities we missed in France. ."

"We know it's going to be tough, they're the favourites, they clearly have a good package, but if we give our best we can beat them and win the championship."

Shovlin has a first explanation for the fact that Mercedes missed its strategy in France by underestimating the power of the undercut (stopping early to change tires and getting enough ahead to pass).

He blamed the loss on the computer after revealing his race strategy prediction models had indicated at the pit wall that Lewis Hamilton was "safe from the undercut" of Max Verstappen.

"We thought when we had just over three seconds on Max we were safe from the undercut and that wasn't the case. Even now we don't fully understand why our models were telling us we would have been fine. So clearly there is something we need to review with our computer and figure out why it was underestimated."

"If we had brought Lewis Hamilton into the lap after Valtteri Bottas, I don't know if Max would have followed us, but if we had, I think it would have put us in a better position."

When asked to clarify what the modeling system had underestimated, Shovlin replied, "The power of the undercut and Max's ability to get back to us being so far after his 2nd save. We're going to have to studying the behavior of the tires after the Paul Ricard. Maybe it was specific to this track. But there was no indication of that, at least for us, after the sessions on Friday and Saturday.