Merc's F1 upgrades might be deceptive – can Ferrari catch it in Canada?

F1

Mercedes' upgrades allowed it to pull clear as best of the rest in Spain, but can Ferrari show its true colours in Canada?

Max Verstappen Red Bull 2023 Spanish GP

Who will lead into Spain's treacherous Turn 1 in 2024?

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Mark Hughes

In the shuffled pack behind Max Verstappen in Barcelona, much was made of the progress of Mercedes. Its revised car was by far the strongest non-Red Bull in the race. Even though it qualified around a tenth slower than Carlos Sainz’s front row Ferrari, it was comfortably the faster car on the Sunday. Even starting 10 places behind Sainz, George Russell finished 13sec ahead. Furthermore, Lewis Hamilton’s 23sec gap behind Verstappen at the flag was significantly smaller than usual (even though the Red Bull driver’s margin of superiority in qualifying was the biggest of the season to date).

While it is clear that the suspension and bodywork updates on the car since Monaco have improved the Mercedes W14 and opened up a more fruitful direction of development, that Barcelona hierarchy between Mercedes, Ferrari and Aston Martin is likely still going to shuffle race-by-race. Hamilton was adamant that this was the best his Mercedes had felt since the beginning of last season. He feels that with the updates the car is now being developed in a direction he’s been pushing for all along. The technical team, he says, has found is ‘north star’.

x Charles Leclerc Ferrari 2023 Spanish GP

Ferrari previously was better through the turns and slower on the straights, something the Maranello higher-ups reportedly thought unbecoming

Ferrari

That all bodes well, but there was a recency bias in the assessment from some that Mercedes had now distanced itself from Ferrari and Aston. Merc’s trackside engineering chief Andrew Shovlin is under no illusions that every race from now is going to be like Barcelona. “The fact is the update kit works very well around circuits like Barcelona with a lot of high-speed performance. But the car itself would still have been ok there [without the update] because we’ve been better at fast circuits and the front-limited tracks. We ended up with a really good balance and really good race pace. But where we are going [next], Montreal, it’s a very different circuit. There are more low-speed corners, quite a lot of straightline full throttle and we would expect more of a challenge there. We are not thinking that we are going in nipping at the heels of Red Bull. We are going in there prepared for a battle with Ferrari, Aston Martin and maybe even Alpine.”

Similarly, we shouldn’t be looking at the Ferrari’s difficult race – Sainz was 46sec behind the leader after 66 laps – as evidence that its big bodywork update introduced there did not work. “I think the update gave us what we believed it would,” said Sainz, “but we introduced it at maybe our worst track.”

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The long high-speed corners of Barcelona worked against the Ferrari just as surely as they helped the Red Bull and Mercedes. Running a much skinnier rear wing than either of those cars (or the Aston) flattered its single lap pace. But even though Sainz was on the front row, Ferrari’s qualifying deficit to pole was actually the second-biggest of the season to date. Only in Melbourne was it further away. Such are its traits, it was always going to struggle around Barcelona with its long high-speed corners and heavy tyre degradation. It would have been further off the qualifying pace had it used more wing, but perhaps better in the race.

Fast corners are not the car’s forte. Last year they were but there was a deliberate trade-off of that for straightline speed with this car. That seemed a questionable shift when they announced it at the launch and even more so now. There’s a story it was because the boss Benedetto Vigna didn’t like the idea that the Ferrari was always slower on the straight than the Red Bull last year, that it was ‘inappropriate’ for Ferrari’s image… For the team’s sake, one must hope that is not true, and that a crucial part of the technical concept has not been influenced by ‘image’. Regardless, because of where the Ferrari’s aero efficiencies are, around Barcelona its lap time does not respond as well to more wing than other cars. But in Montreal there is no high-speed corner demand and as such its suspension can probably be run softer, which might be expected to regain the car the great low-speed corner performance it showed in Baku and Miami. There’s every reason to believe it will be in much better shape in Canada than it was in Spain.

x Carlos Sainz Ferrari 2023 Spanish GP

Scuderia is still lacking on the straights too

Ferrari

Aston Martin’s performance was unusually low-key in Barcelona, but may have looked very different had Fernando Alonso not damaged his floor on his out-lap at the beginning of qualifying. Even with the car compromised in this way, he might have pipped Sainz for that front row grid slot but for a small lock-up on his final Q3 lap. That defined his weekend, behind team-mate Lance Stroll throughout and with the car not reacting well to the soft tyre used for the first two stints. Given that it’s been among the best cars in how it uses its tyres in previous races, Barcelona was the outlier and there’s no reason to suppose it won’t be competing hard for the status of best non-Red Bull in races to come. There’s also a significant upgrade to the car expected for Montreal.

Expect the variation of the competitive order behind Verstappen to continue.

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