On the premise of three quick days of preseason testing in Bahrain, Mercedes’ System One dominance is underneath risk.

Seven straight years of title success warn in opposition to making such statements presently of the 12 months, however should you focus purely on what occurred on observe in Bahrain, it is arduous to not come to the conclusion that Purple Bull has constructed a sooner automobile.

“We will see from the information we have collected over the previous couple of days that on race tempo, we’re not as fast as Purple Bull,” Mercedes’ trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin mentioned on Sunday night.

“The decrease gas work was a extra complicated image, we did not acquire sufficient and we have to go and take a look at our strategy as far too many vehicles have been forward of us on tempo in the present day.”

It should not be a shock that Purple Bull has produced a automobile able to competing with Mercedes.

The previous championship-winning staff misplaced its manner in the beginning of F1’s turbo-hybrid period in 2014, however has at all times had the employees and amenities again at base to return to the entrance.

After a gradual begin to the season final 12 months, Purple Bull made important progress with its automobile idea within the latter half of 2020 and beat Mercedes honest and sq. on the closing race of the season in Abu Dhabi.

With cost-saving laws requiring extra carryover of automobile elements than regular from 2020 to 2021 and engine-supplier Honda pulling out all of the stops forward of its exit from F1 on the finish of the season, a aggressive Purple Bull package deal was to be anticipated this 12 months.

What was shocking throughout testing was the obvious step backward made by Mercedes.

On Sunday night when observe circumstances have been finest, Lewis Hamilton’s quickest lap was 1.065s off Max Verstappen’s finest effort regardless of the Mercedes driver setting his lap on tyre compound that ought to have been 0.3s faster.

Mercedes typically hides its true tempo in testing by operating its automobile heavy with gas, however even permitting for a 20kg discrepancy between the 2 vehicles, the tyre- and fuel-corrected hole would nonetheless be a whopping 0.7s.

What’s extra, Carlos Sainz within the Ferrari and rookie Yuki Tsunoda within the AlphaTauri additionally set instances on Sunday night, which primarily based on fuel-load and tyre corrections, can be 0.35s and 0.15s faster than Hamilton’s lap respectively.

Maybe the shocking tempo of the Ferrari and AlphaTauri ought to act as an extra warning concerning the validity of the lap instances, however even with a big margin for error utilized, Mercedes has clearly misplaced a number of the single-lap prowess that outlined its 2020 season.

When evaluating testing performances with these of rivals at F1’s conventional preseason venue, the Circuit de Catalunya, groups often permit for an error band of 0.4s to 0.5s, however in Bahrain the observe circumstances widened that error band considerably.

Altering wind circumstances has the potential to account for a swing of as much as 0.5s in lap time from one run to the following and the observe was as a lot as 1.5s per lap faster as soon as the solar had gone down within the night.

What’s extra, Bahrain is a power-sensitive circuit, which means the selection of engine mode — which solely the staff will know — is extra crucial to efficiency than it might be in Barcelona.

Put merely, it is most unlikely Sunday’s 1.065s lap time distinction between Verstappen and Hamilton is a real illustration of the hole between the 2 vehicles, however for Mercedes to be forward of Purple Bull would require a variety of caveats to be at play.

Above all else, it is clear Mercedes’ new automobile didn’t meet expectations in testing and the staff is now in a race in opposition to time to grasp why forward of qualifying for the Bahrain Grand Prix on March 27.

What went incorrect for Mercedes?

The three days of testing bought off to a foul begin for Mercedes when Valtteri Bottas reported a gearshift problem on his first lap out of the pits. Within the time it took to suit a brand new gearbox to the automobile, Mercedes sacrificed round 60 laps to its important rivals and it didn’t get well that mileage over the next two and half days.

In an entire reversal from preseason exams lately, Mercedes completed the week on the backside of the mileage charts with 304 laps, in comparison with the 369 laps of Purple Bull and the 422 of the 2 most energetic groups, Alfa Romeo and AlphaTauri.

However not like earlier years, Mercedes mentioned maximising its lap depend was not certainly one of its important aims in Bahrain.

With the carryover of so many elements from 2020 to 2021 to adjust to cost-saving laws, a sure degree of reliability was assumed (regardless of the gearbox problem) and Mercedes believed its time can be higher spent conducting performance-based experiments reasonably than operating the automobile to breaking level.

What’s extra, Bahrain is a circuit that induces excessive rear tyre degradation and operating lengthily stints would have skewed the experiments as a result of drop off in efficiency of the rear tyres — higher to get 12 laps of strong knowledge than a race simulation the place tyre degradation turns into the principle issue on efficiency.

Consequently, it was at all times the plan for Mercedes to restrict its mileage to some extent and concentrate on gaining as a lot high quality knowledge as potential from the 32 units of tyres and three days of testing out there.

However as soon as Mercedes recovered from its early gearbox problem and hit the observe to conduct its experiments, it quickly turned clear that the rear of the automobile was unstable and the drivers have been struggling to extract efficiency from it.

“We’re nonetheless not absolutely comfy [with the car],” Bottas mentioned on Sunday. “We’re going ahead with the set-up of the automobile and the understanding of the automobile and getting it to behave higher, however there may be nonetheless extra work to do.

“So we are going to hold working, we are going to hold making an attempt to get the steadiness higher and get the automobile to behave nicer and hopefully that manner, be sooner.”

It raises the query of how a dominant, well-behaved automobile like final 12 months’s W11 morphed into the tough, unpredictable W12 seen in testing.

Mercedes did not have a solution to that query on Sunday night and can spend the following 11 days earlier than the primary observe session in Bahrain poring over its knowledge to higher perceive it.

However with the automobile’s chassis and nearly all of its mechanical parts being carried over from final 12 months’s championship-winning automobile, the logical conclusion is that the difficulty is linked to the staff’s interpretation of 2021’s new aerodynamic laws.

Sarcastically, the adjustments to the foundations have been launched by the FIA as a security measure following two tyre failures on Mercedes’ vehicles on the British Grand Prix.

The present technology of F1 vehicles are sooner and heavier than another within the sport’s 70-year historical past, and there have been considerations that the ever-increasing stresses going by the tyres would lead to extra failures if automobile growth was left unchecked.

Due to this fact, the governing physique tried to peg again downforce ranges by concentrating on adjustments to 3 important areas: the ground of the automobile, the size of the strakes on the diffuser and the design of the rear brake ducts.

Alone, the person adjustments would not quantity to a lot however collectively they aimed to strip 10 % of downforce from final 12 months’s vehicles.

Naturally, the groups have finished all the things they will to minimise the loss in efficiency over the winter and, primarily based on the final three days of testing, tyre producer Pirelli believes a extra practical determine is a four-to-five % discount in downforce.

The areas focused by the regulation adjustments are significantly delicate to the creation of downforce on the rear of the automobile and it might be the case that Mercedes’ extremely refined 2020 aero package deal was hardest hit.

What’s extra, it is not unusual for positive factors within the wind tunnel to supply undesirable unwanted side effects on observe, particularly when circumstances — such because the excessive winds seen in Bahrain — cannot be replicated on the manufacturing unit.

The staff says the instability was current whatever the wind velocity and route, hinting at a extra elementary problem, however it might doubtless have made extra progress in understanding the automobile if the circumstances had been steady.

It additionally reported that the difficulty was much less apparent on heavy gas, with Mercedes in a position to get nearer to Purple Bull’s degree of efficiency and retain a extra acquainted hole to the midfield groups when specializing in race tempo.

Benefit Purple Bull?

The final time a staff apart from Mercedes was the favorite to win the primary race, it didn’t go to plan.

After preseason testing in 2019, the paddock was satisfied Ferrari had the quickest automobile however when F1 turned up for the primary race in Australia it was Mercedes that dominated.

Whereas it was true that Mercedes had struggled in the course of the first week of testing, its growth curve was far steeper than Ferrari’s and by the point the opening race rolled spherical it had resumed its place on the entrance whereas the Melbourne circuit uncovered previously-unseen weaknesses on Ferrari’s automobile.

The state of affairs this 12 months is completely different as the primary race is because of be held on the identical venue because the check, and the tell-tale indicators of enchancment Mercedes confirmed on low gas on the finish of the 2019 preseason weren’t current in Bahrain — if something it was the alternative.

What’s extra, the event curve of this 12 months’s vehicles shouldn’t be anticipated to be as steep as prior to now. Focus has already shifted to the regulation overhaul coming in 2022 and the introduction of a price range cap and new wind tunnel restrictions this 12 months means there may be much less useful resource to throw at troubleshooting the 2021 design.

As an alternative Mercedes should perceive what went incorrect in testing and discover fixes inside the present specification of the automobile.

The group of engineers on the staff have proved through the years that they’re adept at downside fixing, however previous success isn’t any assure they are going to discover a repair in time for the primary race.

“We are going to crunch the information to grasp the place we carried out effectively and the place we didn’t, the place we had good correlation to our simulations within the [wind] tunnel and the place not,” staff boss Toto Wolff mentioned on Sunday.

“It is like sleeping on an thought; the following day you get up extra clever.”

It could be courageous to wager in opposition to Mercedes at this stage, nevertheless it’s additionally honest to say the staff has not had such a troublesome preseason since its interval of dominance started in 2014.

What’s extra, Mercedes points shouldn’t detract from the robust efficiency of Purple Bull in Bahrain and even when the world champions discover a answer, it is unlikely that there important rivals will stand nonetheless.

The mixture of the 2 may very well be sufficient to tip the steadiness because the 2021 season will get underway and will definitely make for an enchanting begin to the season.