The first of the others
There Mercedes in the debut race of the new regulations and the 2026 world championship, it was without a shadow of a doubt the best car on the track. Only Ferrariin the first stages of the race, managed to worry the Silver Arrows, thanks to an excellent start at the start which allowed Charles Leclerc to lead the group ahead of George Russell – later winner of the race.
Third place for the Monegasque driver and fourth for a rediscovered Lewis Hamilton they are a good start for Ferrari, in the knowledge that there will be a race for updates with a huge margin for improvement.
he asked Luigi Mazzola (present on Instagram at this address) – for 21 years at Maranello in various roles, including that of technical manager of the test area in the Schumacher era – an opinion on the Reds’ possibilities of closing the gap on Mercedes during the season.
An SF-26 that leaves room for optimism
Engineer Mazzola, from the Australian data – and as also confirmed by Norris after the race – in terms of chassis the Ferrari SF-26 seems to have been born well.
Is closing the gap from Mercedes on the engine and energy management front a possible undertaking for the world dream?
“I agree, Ferrari was born well. And besides being born well above all she was readymade very good use of the tests and was able to verify all its components and procedures. Proof either way both drivers perform well: this shows that the car is valid as a general compromise and therefore in terms of balance, aerodynamic load, braking and traction. From this point, Ferrari proved to be the second absolute force in this grand prix. The others were out of this world, only six of them arrived at full speed. Let’s leave aside Verstappen, who started far behind, but Norris has demonstrated all the limitations compared to the first two teams.”
So is there room for a bit of optimism for Ferrari fans or does this Mercedes not allow dreams of glory?
“There is certainly room for optimismbecause the cars are immature, they do not come from years of development. I think there will be a lot of development on these machines and therefore the optimism is all there. You can’t think that after the first grand prix, with a totally new regulation, you can immediately christen who will be world champion and the winning team, it’s absurd.
Normally in let’s say more traditional situations, until last year, at least three or four grand prix were needed to understand what the performance ranking was. Here we will need even more races, because different types of circuits are needed. Depending on the type of track, the cars will have more or less difficulty in having electric power available for as long as possible and therefore knowing how to charge the batteries well.
The optimism is all there. Today we saw that there is a team ahead of everyone and it is a fact. They did better, they did everything they had to do. Ferrari worked very well, but in Australia they were not up to the standard of Mercedes. The others, however, were out of this world.”
