A new 2016
The new technical regulation of F1 instead of keeping the Circus going has it set back 10 years. No, not for the 22 single-seaters on the grid which actually hadn’t been seen since 2016, but for the gap closed by Mercedes to the rest of the group in qualifying: George Russell in pole position, Andrea Kimi Antonelli second, 293 thousandths behind and then nothing. The third, the first non-Mercedes driver, is Isack Hadjar with the Red Bull taking a gap of 785 thousandths.
To find one again such a big difference in the first qualifying of the season between the first and third classified we must go back, precisely, to 2016 season. Even then there were two silver arrows sharing the stage – Lewis Hamilton first, Nico Rosberg second at three tenths – and the rest of the world was far away. The third at the time was Sebastian Vettel, with Ferrari, who grossed more eight tenths of gap.
Is the championship already a matter of two?
To make a comparison in the qualification of Bahrain GP 2022first race of the previous technical era, the first three positions in qualifying were collected in 129 thousandths and within 785 thousandths there were five drivers from three different teams. 12 months ago the much celebrated McLaren of the Norris-Piastri duo, defined as dominant, trailed Verstappen, third, by less than four tenths. Even in the 2023 year, that of Red Bull’s 21 victories in 22 GPs, the first qualifying in Bahrain saw seven drivers collected within six tenths.
Naturally we are only at the beginning of a very long championship, there will certainly be room for comebacks and technical developments on the part of Mercedes’ rival teams, but the starting gap is abysmal and at this moment it seems very difficult to imagine that there is a team capable of reaching the performance level of the Brackley single-seaters before the end of the year. And who knows, maybe someone in the halls of power of Formula 1 and the federation, seeing this disproportion of performance, is regretting having insisted so much to define this new regulation. The first impression, after this Australian dawn, is that something went wrong. And the clock went back 10 years.
