Mercedes delivered its most competitive outing of the season so far in Melbourne last week, prompting questions within the team about whether that form indicates a lasting improvement.
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George Russell and Lewis Hamilton started the Australian Grand Prix from second and third on the grid after Sergio Perez was knocked out in Q1, which left the Mercedes pair immediately behind race leader Max Verstappen.
Both Mercedes drivers got ahead of Verstappen at the start, but Red Bull’s race pace proved stronger over the full distance. Russell retired with a power unit failure and did not see the chequered flag, while Hamilton held off Fernando Alonso to secure second place — Mercedes’ best result of the season so far.
After qualifying Hamilton suggested the team’s performance might have been “perhaps track-specific,” noting their off-podium finishes in Bahrain and Jeddah. Russell, however, argued that the result reflected actual improvements to the car.
“For sure, we maximised the job [on Saturday], no doubt about it,” Russell said. “We had a good qualifying last week in Jeddah. I didn’t put my lap together in the last run in Jeddah, and was only a tenth off P3. So no, I don’t think it’s necessarily track-specific. I do think we’re making some improvements with the understanding of the car.”
Russell also pointed to the difficulty of extracting optimal performance from Pirelli tyres in cool qualifying conditions as a factor behind fluctuating results.
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“The tyres play a big factor,” he said. “When you get those tyres in the sweet spot, you make a big jump, and I think even I improved four-tenths maybe on my last run in Q3. So unfortunately, it’s all tyres, tyres, tyres.”
Mercedes’ chief technical officer James Allison described the team’s progress as modest but tangible, noting some gains relative to rivals that were partly accentuated by the weekend’s circumstances.
“We didn’t have huge breakthroughs but we moved forward a little bit,” Allison said in a team-produced video. “We put a small amount on the leaders, Red Bull, and we’re starting to get on terms with and maybe just nose a whisker in front of the Ferraris and the Aston Martin.”
Allison added that Australia’s overall performance levels were broadly similar to the other early-season rounds. The key difference, he suggested, was that Red Bull were not as strong in qualifying as they had been at other tracks, which tightened the running order.
“Was it expected? Broadly, yes, because actually the performance level in Australia was not markedly different to that in the other two tracks so far this year. Different, yes, to Red Bull, but not a completely different animal compared to the rest of the field. I think probably the biggest shift in Australia was actually that Red Bull were a little bit more off-form in qualifying compared to the rest of the grid and that sort of closed up the grid. But if you look at the relative pace of our car to the Ferrari, our car to the Aston Martin, it’s been close-ish all year. Yes, we’re a little bit on the better side, but it wasn’t seismic.”
He said the team’s weekend result fell within the range of expectations and emphasised the need to observe performance at a wider set of tracks to determine whether Melbourne was an early sign of sustained improvement.
“We expected to be in the fight with Ferrari and Aston Martin and it’s pleasing just have our noses in front. But we did expect to be there. How much of the overall good result of the weekend was track-specific and how much came from things we did, I guess time will tell. We’ll go to some more very different tracks in the next few weeks and we’ll see whether this was the sort of initial bellwether of a general uptick in our performance, which we hope, or whether it was related to the quite unusual track conditions that we saw this weekend in Melbourne.”
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