This is part of the online version of this Sunday’s edition (5/22) of Flavio Gomes’ newsletter. To subscribe to the newsletter and access the full content, click here.
As soon as he got back on track in Barcelona on the second lap of the Spanish GP, after puncturing a tire in one touch with Kevin Magnussen and dropping to 19th position, Lewis Hamilton took a deep breath and joined the team radio.
“Guys, it’s really hot here, I’m thirty seconds behind everyone, how about we give up and go out for a paella? We can have a sangria, too, I know a restaurant called Salamanca in Barceloneta that is great and not expensive . Are you okay?”
Of course, those weren’t quite the words, but let’s take the meaning of the suggestion. In real life, the Englishman just asked if it wasn’t a case of saving that engine and dispensing with the useless effort of screaming for nothing. He remembered the race in Saudi Arabia, where he started 15th and finished 10th without even knowing if that position gave him championship points.
He heard a resounding “no” from his engineer Peter Bonning, “Bono”, who did some quick math and concluded that he could make it to eighth if he dispensed with paella and sangria and stayed on the track.
“I didn’t understand anything at the time and I thought he had been a little too optimistic,” said the Englishman after the race. He stayed. He finished fifth. And he would be fourth if, on the penultimate lap, the team didn’t ask him to lighten his foot because a water leak could cause the engine to boil and explode in beautiful smoke.
Further on, his teammate George Russell would finish the race in third place, his second podium of the year. Before him, the Red Bull duo Max Verstappen and Sergio Pérez were already celebrating the team’s second one-two of the year. Ferrari, which had started the season by bursting the balloon’s mouth, suffered from Charles Leclerc’s abandonment and was satisfied with Carlos Sainz’s fourth position. A result that took the Monegasque from the lead in the classification and the team from the top of the table in the Constructors’ World Cup.
After a disastrous start to the championship, the silver gang finally smiled. We have a car, everyone seemed to say. Now, let’s try to develop it.
Mercedes took six races to resolve the chronic problem that has plagued Hamilton and Russell since pre-season testing in February. The so-called “porpoising”, which can be translated as “the movement of a dolphin when it swims happily twisting its backbone”. In short, the car hits the asphalt a lot, loses aerodynamic pressure, jumps like a goat, and when it recovers the “downforce”, it hits the ground again and goes up again, in an endless bounce that leaves the pilots’ lumbars in pandarecos and prevents them from accelerating everything on the straights.
There were long months of studies, simulations and attempts to solve the problem, until on Friday the cars appeared in Barcelona with a new floor, full of cuts and undulations, and suddenly they no longer jumped – and, in short, the Mercedes is back.
Did you come back to win Sunday in Monaco and fight to be champion? Not yet. The second phase starts now, with a reasonable delay in relation to the competition: improving something that, in practice, did not yet exist – a real race car.
Mercedes boss Toto Wolff spoke much more about Hamilton’s performance in Barcelona than Russell’s podium, who has been doing his best to keep the team’s morale high. He is the only driver who scored points at all stages of the year and, more than that, he reached the top five in all of them. Which puts him in an honest fourth position in the championship with 74 points, against 110 for the now leader Verstappen. Hamilton, in sixth, has 46.
For Wolff, if it weren’t for the flat tire in the scrubbing with Magnussen on the first lap, Lewis would be fighting for victory with Red Bull. Maybe it’s an exaggeration. Russell, with the same three-stop strategy as his rivals, came in third 32s927 behind the Dutchman. Hamilton took the checkered flag 54s534 after Max. Even discounting what he lost with the pit stop and almost the entire lap with a flat tire, the 30 seconds behind everyone else, it would still be very difficult to beat the wheel up front with the leaders.
But it’s a light at the end of the tunnel, no doubt. Mercedes has been claiming for months that its skinny, weird car has potential, and it just needed to find the little key that would make it a protagonist again. After all, the team’s recent past cannot be overlooked, which since 2014 has won eight Constructors’ and seven Drivers’ world titles. Would they miss it that badly now, out of nowhere?
The answers began to be given in Barcelona. They found the key. It’s too late to think about a direct title fight. It’s been six races, Red Bull is flying and, of course, it hasn’t rested on its laurels with Verstappen’s four victories this year, thinking that everything is settled. It will also improve your car, evolve, grow. Before thinking about being champion, Mercedes needs to start fighting for podiums. Then, relearn the path of victories.
When that happens, the 2022 Inês will have already been veiled and buried. But the championship is long and it’s not just about being champion. Winning races is a permanent objective, even if the cup is left for later – in this case, 2023. Mercedes’ target at the moment is not Red Bull, but Ferrari. It needs to pick up the pieces and understand that it’s no use having a car that looks like a ferocious jaguar in classification, a Juma Marruá, and turns into a harmless capybara in race.
From what he showed in Barcelona, and from his ability to turn things around, it’s Mercedes now that Red Bull has to worry about.
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READ MORE IN THE NEWSLETTER
In this week’s newsletter, Flavio Gomes remembers two other anniversaries: the 25th anniversary of Barrichello’s vice president in Monaco and the 10th anniversary of Pastor Maldonado’s victory. He also comments on the new management of the Brasília circuit and gives tips on what to read, see and hear.
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