The Morning After: Who's Sandbagging Now?

Friday, 15 March 2019 at 20:00

Dominating the opening two sessions of the 2019 season, Mercedes just made the task of divining the F1 pecking order even harder than it was already.

Forget handbags at dawn, on Friday in Melbourne, it was sandbags at dusk.

How else can you describe the bizarre situation we have after second practice? Mercedes at the top, sure I can buy that, but by

eight tenths? If testing meant anything at all, that seems a little off.

Either Mercedes pulled the mother of all sandbag-jobs in testing, or Ferrari are yet to take theirs off – or maybe it’s both. That’s the only way you can explain how Mercedes have it looking like it’s 2014 all over again.

Still, considering how good they looked in testing, it seems only fair to give Ferrari the benefit of the doubt, but there’s at least enough here to raise an eyebrow.

Sure, outright pace is always a bit of a misnomer on Fridays, but the race sims can provide valuable insight, and over comparative long runs on the soft tyre, Lewis Hamilton averaged a 1:28.238 (7 laps) to Sebastian Vettel’s 1:28.951 (9 laps, and that’s being generous in excluding several others) – a difference of 0.713s, and a far more concerning figure.

Just yesterday in his media availability, Charles Leclerc remarked “we never really know how much [Mercedes are] sandbagging, and how much we were sandbagging compared to them”, and that’s really what this comes down to.

For what it’s worth, the vibe remarked-on by some Italian journos at Ferrari was one of mild

Nico Hulkenberg.

Friday Figures

15. The trickiest turn on the track, if Friday is anything to go by. Compared to most circuits Albert Park has a decent amount of rubber down already with all the support races, but that particular corner looked very green, with multiple drivers missing their braking point.

3 and 4. Final positions for Red Bull’s Max Verstappen and Pierre Gasly, 0.8s and 0.842s off the lead, respectively. Unlike Mercedes and Ferrari, it doesn’t really make sense to keep pace in hand, which suggests they’re still very much the third team on the grid.

1.72. Seconds between P18 Lando Norris and P19 George Russell, with Russell’s Williams teammate Robert Kubica a further 0.202s behind. Might as well start practicing blue-flag procedure already.

Quick Hits

Not the greatest start to the Red Bull-Honda relationship with Pierre Gasly’s loss of power at the end of FP2. Honda are reporting it to be a “minor” issue, but more concerning is it also being an “unspecified” one.
Fronting up to the media for the first time this season, perhaps the most interesting thing about Jean Todt and Chase Carey’s press conference on Friday was not anything they said, but the fact that it marked the first time they’d ever answered questions together. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but it’s certainly not the first time they’ve attended the same race, and it doesn’t speak well to the relationship between commercial and governing bodies that it’s taken until the third year of their partnership for this to happen.
Has no one told Kimi Raikkonen he’s no longer driving for Ferrari? The man still managed top 6 in his Alfa, and I doubt I was the only one who had to double-check he wasn’t still at the Scuderia.