Questions for the 2014 Bahrain GP
Is a Mercedes hat-trick anything but an inevitability? Will recovering Red Bull be overpowered at Sakhir? And plenty more...
Thursday 3 April 2014 14:08, UK
Will Bahrain hurt Red Bull's revival?
F1 is making a rapid return to Sakhir, just one month after testing came to an end there. As such, the race will indicate just how far teams have come in the intervening weeks - yet surely there's little doubt already who has progressed farthest of all. March started with Sebastian Vettel pushing Red Bull's flaky RB10 back to its garage at the Bahrain International Circuit after it had spluttered to a halt in the pitlane; it ended with him 'best of the rest' behind omnipotent Mercedes in Malaysia. From barely being able to string several laps together without some misfortune or other rearing up, they could race the requisite 56 at Sepang as though their pre-season tribulations were a fast-fading memory, if not a bad dream. Extrapolate forward and won't Vettel, winner in Bahrain in both 2012 and last year, have the hat-trick in his sights? That's an extrapolation too far, it seems. Although Red Bull are clearly delighted with progress, they anticipate that Mercedes' clear power advantage over Renault will mean a more difficult weekend at a track which plays even more to the Silver Arrows' strengths than last weekend's did. The RB10 might have matched the W05 in Sepang's long, high-speed corners midway round the lap, but it was left for dead on the two long straights at the beginning and end - each preceded by a slow corner that places a premium on braking/energy recovery/traction. And although the straights at the Bahrain International Circuit aren't as long there are more of them, with more traction events and less of the high-speed stuff to compensate. "I think their advantage in Bahrain possibly will be bigger than it was here because obviously that's quite a power-dominated circuit," team boss Christian Horner admitted after the Malaysia GP. "Our middle sector you could see and we got pretty close to them in the last sector. But the first sector was where they've killed us all weekend." Horner reckoned Merc's advantage was "about half a second to sometimes more than that" and with the short gap between races, he doubted that Red Bull and Renault could do much to address it. Furthermore, with Vettel's performance (and that of Daniel Ricciardo in Australia, pre-disqualification) built on a strong performance in wet qualifying, he also pointed out the obvious. "I don't think we're going to have a solution overnight and it doesn't tend to rain much in Bahrain either. We're going to try and make as much progress as we can in the week; the dynos are busy running in Paris and hopefully we can nudge a bit closer to them again, if at all possible, next weekend." Not sounding too hopeful, then, but it's all relative. Considering where we were at with the engine, what we're doing is beyond expectation," Horner added. "Renault know there's a lot more to come once they sort out driveability issues and so on. Hopefully our curve in terms of catching up in straight line speed, whilst it's steep, we should be able to make steps."
@SkySportsMike Can Sergio Perez kick-start his season?
Even discounting the fact that Sergio Perez failed to take the start in Malaysia, he has been largely anonymous in the opening two weekends of his Force India career. At the season opening race in Australia, Perez finished bottom of Q2 - even behind the Caterham of Kamui Kobayashi - whilst his team-mate Nico Hulkenberg went
F1 is making a rapid return to Sakhir, just one month after testing came to an end there. As such, the race will indicate just how far teams have come in the intervening weeks - yet surely there's little doubt already who has progressed farthest of all. March started with Sebastian Vettel pushing Red Bull's flaky RB10 back to its garage at the Bahrain International Circuit after it had spluttered to a halt in the pitlane; it ended with him 'best of the rest' behind omnipotent Mercedes in Malaysia. From barely being able to string several laps together without some misfortune or other rearing up, they could race the requisite 56 at Sepang as though their pre-season tribulations were a fast-fading memory, if not a bad dream. Extrapolate forward and won't Vettel, winner in Bahrain in both 2012 and last year, have the hat-trick in his sights? That's an extrapolation too far, it seems. Although Red Bull are clearly delighted with progress, they anticipate that Mercedes' clear power advantage over Renault will mean a more difficult weekend at a track which plays even more to the Silver Arrows' strengths than last weekend's did. The RB10 might have matched the W05 in Sepang's long, high-speed corners midway round the lap, but it was left for dead on the two long straights at the beginning and end - each preceded by a slow corner that places a premium on braking/energy recovery/traction. And although the straights at the Bahrain International Circuit aren't as long there are more of them, with more traction events and less of the high-speed stuff to compensate. "I think their advantage in Bahrain possibly will be bigger than it was here because obviously that's quite a power-dominated circuit," team boss Christian Horner admitted after the Malaysia GP. "Our middle sector you could see and we got pretty close to them in the last sector. But the first sector was where they've killed us all weekend." Horner reckoned Merc's advantage was "about half a second to sometimes more than that" and with the short gap between races, he doubted that Red Bull and Renault could do much to address it. Furthermore, with Vettel's performance (and that of Daniel Ricciardo in Australia, pre-disqualification) built on a strong performance in wet qualifying, he also pointed out the obvious. "I don't think we're going to have a solution overnight and it doesn't tend to rain much in Bahrain either. We're going to try and make as much progress as we can in the week; the dynos are busy running in Paris and hopefully we can nudge a bit closer to them again, if at all possible, next weekend." Not sounding too hopeful, then, but it's all relative. Considering where we were at with the engine, what we're doing is beyond expectation," Horner added. "Renault know there's a lot more to come once they sort out driveability issues and so on. Hopefully our curve in terms of catching up in straight line speed, whilst it's steep, we should be able to make steps."
@SkySportsMike Can Sergio Perez kick-start his season?
Even discounting the fact that Sergio Perez failed to take the start in Malaysia, he has been largely anonymous in the opening two weekends of his Force India career. At the season opening race in Australia, Perez finished bottom of Q2 - even behind the Caterham of Kamui Kobayashi - whilst his team-mate Nico Hulkenberg went
