Mercedes' decline began at Bahrain '21. Did Red Bull start crumbling at this year's GP?

F1

Red Bull revealed its pace that would end Mercedes' F1 stranglehold at the 2021 Bahrain GP. Three years on, amid turmoil in the team, Mark Hughes asks if we're seeing the signs that its own reign is about to be toppled

Lewis Hamilton ahead of Max Verstappen in 2021 F1 Bahrain GP

Chasing Hamilton took its toll on Verstappen's tyres

Florent Gooden/DPPI

Mark Hughes

Three years ago in Bahrain we got confirmation that Red Bull had finally been able to provide Max Verstappen with a car in which he could fight for the sport’s biggest prize. His victorious debut with the team, Barcelona 2016, had relied on the much faster Mercedes of Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg crashing into each other. It hadn’t been the harbinger of a new era, but Bahrain ’21 was. Mercedes had had its wings clipped – or rather its floor.

A new regulation cut a diagonal line of floor area away. In creating underfloor downforce the low-rake Mercedes cars had always relied on a big floor area to offset the high-rake of other shorter-floored cars such as the Red Bull. Cutting that line from the front of the exposed part of the floor to the rear along its length lost the long Mercedes a bigger area of floor than the others on a car which had not been designed around the high-rake concept. It wasn’t as if Mercedes could have started again to accommodate the change; its existing 2020 chassis had to be used as a post-covid cost-saving measure.

As if that had not been enough, there was another regulation change perhaps even more damaging to the Mercedes: the strakes everyone ran on their rear brake ducts to link-up the airflow to the diffuser exit were drastically snipped. On a high-rake car the diffuser was situated close to the brake ducts anyway, so it wasn’t a big deal. But on a low-rake car such as the Mercedes, with the diffuser and brake ducts further apart, that flow could no longer connect up. In two regulatory hits, Mercedes had just lost a big chunk of underfloor downforce. Red Bull not so much.

Red Bull of Max Verstappen alongside Mercedes of Lewis Hamilton at the start of the 2021 F1 Bahrain Grand Prix

Rule tweaks helped Red Bull take the fight to Mercedes in 2021

Bryn Lennon/Getty Images via Red Bull

That and the productive path Red Bull had got itself onto by the end of 2020 and the ever-more impressive power units from Honda meant the ’21 season-opener in Bahrain represented a competitive reset for F1 after seven years of Mercedes domination. “We’ve analysed all the data from testing and this weekend,” said the team’s trackside engineering chief Andrew Shovlin, “and on our best bits we are as quick as them, but no quicker. On their best bits they are quicker than us. We are much slower into Turn 10, the slow off-camber downhill hairpin. That’s the biggest loss by far, but we’re also slower than them through Turns 5-6, a high-speed combination corner. Which suggests that we’d got all we could get because trying to fix one of those was making the other worse. Fundamentally the car is unstable at the rear and through the test and through the weekend we have just been trying to find ways of masking that instability.”

Through the season they would find ways of doing that, but at this first race that was the competitive state of play. The regulation tweak had changed the beautifully balanced 2020 chassis into something rather more challenging. Hamilton had locked up and ran wide at Turn 10 on his crucial Q3 lap and that exaggerated the gap. He was on the front row, but 0.4sec slower than Verstappen. With an error-free lap the gap between the cars looked like it was perhaps half of that.

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Verstappen led away and set a pace at which his tyres could live long enough for a standard two-stop race, Hamilton hung on to him around 1.7-1.8sec back as they both pulled away from a pack led by the other Mercedes of Valtteri Bottas. It was expected they’d run this first stint for about 20 laps but Mercedes had a bold plan. It brought Hamilton in on lap 13 to undercut him past Verstappen. Although this would give Hamilton track position going into the next two stints, the final one was going to be very long, and the later-stopping Verstappen was going to have a big tyre advantage on this track with such high tyre deg.

Verstappen exited his final stop 8.8sec behind on tyres 11 laps newer and with 17 laps to go. With five laps left he was with him. As they came to lap Antonio Giovinazzi, Hamilton got a little pinned in on the approach to Turn 4 and Verstappen went around his outside. But critically, he ran out of road and completed the pass with all four wheels well off the track. He was told to hand the place back – which was more controversial than it might ordinarily have been because Hamilton had been off track there 29 times before being told by his team to respect the track limits. The race directors notes had said that, unlike in qualifying, track limits at Turn 4 would not be monitored ‘for lap time’. Hamilton took this as meaning he could run wide there so long as he didn’t gain or defend a position. No, his team told him, he must stay within the lines regardless.

Verstappen gave the place back but it seemed just a matter of time before he could make the move stick – except he then had a major oversteer moment out of Turn 13 as it was revealed that his chase of Hamilton in which he’d made up those 8.8sec had taken a heavy toll on his rear tyres. They had no more to give and Hamilton was off the hook for a win very much against the run of competitive play.

Max Verstappen alongside Lewis Hamilton in 2021 F1 Bahrain GP

Verstappen had to concede the lead after running off track as he passed Hamilton

Florent Gooden / DPPI

Mercedes chief strategist James Vowles was ecstatic. “The emotion is – I hate to admit – more than anything I felt in the entirety of last year including winning the championship. I give up my life to travel the world and win races but to fight for it like we did today feels incredible. It wasn’t just strategy. Everything needs to come together perfectly, you need the tyre deg to actually cope with doing such long stints. You need the balance of the car and the set up to be right and frankly you need someone like Lewis behind the wheel who is able to deal with that.”

But they weren’t going to be able to keep doing this. It was a very specific set of circumstances which made it possible. Red Bull and Verstappen were coming. The clock to a new era was counting down and we had just this ’21 season as the crossover. Mercedes had ruled for seven years, now the momentum was slowing. Around this same track last weekend Verstappen took his 55th career victory. Yet it was amid a team being rocked to its foundations by the controversy around team principal Christian Horner and the apparent power play which has followed. Incredible as it may seem, with Verstappen right in the middle of one of the most dominant streaks ever seen in F1, it’s even being seriously discussed that he may leave. It can’t be so, surely?

Just as Bahrain ’21 suggested the beginning of the end of the Mercedes era, was last week what the beginning of the end of the Red Bull era looks like? With continuing domination on track but the foundations cracking beneath?

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