Red Bull and Ferrari are best placed to prevent Mercedes from dominating Formula 1 again in 2016.
It is always a bit dangerous to write previews before we have seen new cars running, but more often than not the pre-season testing in F1 is misleading, and we don’t really find out what the situation is before the qualifying sessions begin in Melbourne.
We are now going into the third season of the F1 new engine formulae and logic dictates that the competition should be closing up, as knowledge and experience spreads among the teams. Mercedes had a big advantage in Year One. The rest struggled. In Year Two Renault screwed up and Ferrari improved.
In theory there should be a law of diminishing returns in Year Three, although Mercedes engine boss Andy Cowell recently said that there is still plenty of potential being developed and there is no sign that progress is slowing, so we may just see more of the same., with the World Championship being fought over by the two Mercedes drivers.
Ferrari hopes not and they, I think, are the people to watch. James Allison is a top man and he has the whole technical side of the operation under his control, leaving the team management to be largely cosmetic.
The other big question is how Red Bull is going to do. We know that the team can build a good chassis, but in recent years relations with engine supplier Renault have been chillier than an icebox in Greenland and it all got so messy last year that the contract was even thrown away, only for Red Bull to have to come back and beg for engines when no-one else wanted to know. Now the team has Renault engines badged as TAG-Heuers, which is really nothing more a fig leaf to cover Red Bull’s embarrassment.
The team should be better than the new factory Renault operation, but it all really depends on what has been going on at Viry-Chatillon and whether there has been some significant progress.
Williams has been third for the last two seasons, thanks to being a Mercedes customer but, not surprisingly, the team fell behind last season because it has a great deal less money than Mercedes. The problem for Williams is that as others get their act together, the chances are that the team will slip backwards in the pecking order. Williams is well aware of the and last year took the decision to stop development of the 2015 car earlier than its rivals, in order to work on the 2016 chassis. This probably explains why Force India looked a lot better as the year went on. Williams has built decent cars in recent years but they have also had weaknesses, notably on twisty tracks and in the wet. They have gone well at fast flowing tracks. That weakness needs to be removed and the team has been working hard on its aerodynamic development and has taken on test driver Gary Paffett to help them better understand where they need to be in terms of simulation. Will it all pay off? We will have to see, but I suspect Williams will have to fight for third this year, possible with Red Bull and maybe even with Force India.
The Silverstone team has done an amazing job in recent years. The team is very well run and has an extremely clever technical crew, the only problems come at ownership level, where things are a real mess. The key question is whether or not the money supply is solid and stable. If it is then I would expect to see the team continuing to make progress. Without money, the engineers are held back and the results will be affected.
That is exactly what happened at Lotus, where the old ownership made the disastrous mistake of failing to pay staff on time late in 2014. This meant that contracts were broken and a large number of people walked away. Enstone is a robust organisation with layers of good people, but there is only so much damage a team can take. Last year the car – with a Mercedes engine - was still good enough to allow Romain Grosjean to score a podium in Spa, but a switch to Renault this year and an engine change that was so late that it is almost impossible to believe there will be a car in time, means that the team is a little on the back foot, even if the takeover by Renault means that money is flowing again. It will be interesting to see the development, but we should not expect too much too soon.
It is hard to know at this point how the midfield will pan out. Scuderia Toro Rosso has good people, good drivers and the money to do a decent job. The problem was that there was a late engine change from Renault to Ferrari and while this ought to lead to an improvement overall, I hear that the designers had quite a struggle to get the Italian engine into the back of a car that was sculpted for a Renault. Time will tell what effect this will have. Sauber is also a Ferrari customer and cuts its cloth carefully when it comes to budgets. The team did a decent job last year and was never far from the minor points scoring positions, but we will have to see if that remains the case in 2016.
It is equally difficult to assess where we would expect to see Manor and the new Haas F1 team. The American team ought to be in the midfield, based on what we know of how the car was developed, but a new team is a new team and things take time to come together. What we do know is that Romain Grosjean is one of the fastest guys out there and he will get the maximum from whatever the package is he is given. I expect some good results from the team, but I don’t know what that will actually mean.
It is a little the same with Manor Mercedes. On paper the package should be good and the team ought really to be able to mix it with Force India, if not perhaps Williams. But one must remember that a year ago Manor was the ropes after a cataclysmic winter of 2014-2015. Coming back from that is not easy. There are plenty of new staff, but there are still question marks over money, although perhaps these will not come into play until later in the year. It really rather depends on the driver choice.
McLaren is also very difficult to place in the order. This is due entirely to the engines. We know that the team can build a good chassis but if Honda cannot build a competitive engine, the story is not going to be any different to the story last year. I hear bad stories about the latest Honda developments and I am not expecting the team to leap forwards. From what I hear the Japanese are still refusing to listen to any outsiders and believe that they will solve all the problems themselves. They have changed a great deal on the engine but I hear it is now heavy and unreliable – and not much more powerful. If this is the case, then it is going to be a hard slog for Fernando Alonso and Jenson Button. Neither man is going to much enjoy another year of pain and one wonders if one or the other, or both might simply decide that they are better off going fishing...
Joe Saward has been covering Formula 1 full-time for 28 years. He has not missed a race since 1988.
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