For the first time in the turbo-hybrid era, the Mercedes will start the championship without being champion in terms of the ranking reserved for drivers. Brackley’s team managed to withstand the onslaught of Red Bull in the Constructors’ standings, but Max Verstappen not without luck dethroned Lewis Hamilton by becoming world champion on the last lap of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. Mercedes had dominated the 2020 season by beating the competition, but since the pre-season tests carried out in Bahrain a trend reversal emerged compared to the recent past. That Red Bull had become a concrete threat was already clear at Sakhir, even if Lewis Hamilton managed to get the better of Max Verstappen at the end of a race that already included what would have been the 2021 championship, or a battle on the edge. of the thousandths in which each decision of the commissioners could assume a relevant specific weight.
Red Bull with the RB16-B has corrected the defects that emerged at the design level in 2020 regarding the RB16 and Honda has made important efforts to present at the start of the season a RA621H power unit not only powerful and fast, but also reliable . Mercedes, on the other hand, had already taken into account the loss of the DAS certified already when the Brackley team presented this innovative tool in the Barcelona tests. The FIA has in fact made legal the movement of the steering wheel aimed at correcting the axis of the front wheels, but only for 2020, banning it starting from 2021. What has definitively balanced the forces in the field, however, were the regulatory changes in the area rear of the single-seaters, especially what concerned the length of the car bottom reduced near the rear wheels.
The goal was to safeguard the Pirelli tires from the downforce escalation developed by the single-seaters, a decision that particularly penalized projects based on a low-rake philosophy such as Mercedes and Aston Martin, resulting in a less indigestible novelty for those who like Red Bull had focused on a very unbalanced high-rake set-up towards the front as regards the height of the front and rear axles. “We underestimated this aspect – He admitted Toto Wolff interviewed by the German newspaper Auto Motor und Sport – we thought that the advantage we had in 2020 was enough to equalize this loss of performance, but it wasn’t like that. I think the new 2021 regulation cost us about a second. In the tests in Bahrain it immediately became clear that we were wrong in terms of forecasts and expectations ”.
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