Red Bull dominates the first race of the season in Formula 1 and sobers up the competition. The frustration at Mercedes is particularly great. Team boss Toto Wolff is sobered up to the max, his pilot George Russell is even handing out the world championship titles.
Toto Wolff has only completed one of the 23 planned races of this Formula 1 season – and still seen enough. The Mercedes team boss summarized the result of his team as “one of the worst days in racing”. At the Bahrain Grand Prix, Lewis Hamilton crossed the finish line in fifth place, with George Russell in seventh place. “Really not good at all” was the performance of the silver, who actually want to fight for victories and world titles again after a messed up previous year. “There are no positive things, not a single positive news here,” said Wolff: “There is a lack of pace, there is a lack of downforce and then of course nothing works.”
Even worse than fifth and seventh place, which are associated with at least 16 points and third place in the constructors’ championship, was the gap to the top for the Austrian. Hamilton was 50.977 seconds behind race winner Max Verstappen, who converted his pole position into a lead that he effortlessly extended over the course of the 57 laps and then brought it to the finish line in a relaxed manner. Sergio Perez drove the second Red Bull almost 12 seconds behind Verstappen in second place, followed by a huge gap to the rest of the field.
“Red Bull is on another planet,” said Wolff about the superiority of the racing team, which had already dominated the 2022 season and now seems to have increased the gap to the competition again. Verstappen in particular hardly ever seemed to have to push the RB19 to the limit and yet always had everything under control. “The gap is huge,” said the Mercedes boss, “and to close the gap we don’t have to take normal steps, we have to take big ones.” Wolff had already announced after qualifying that the W14 would have to be fundamentally redesigned and that the underlying design concept would appear to have been completely abandoned.
A “dramatic wake-up call” for Mercedes
George Russell, who had clinched the only Mercedes victory of the 2022 season at the Brazilian Grand Prix in November, expressed similar resignation. “Red Bull already has the world championship in the bag,” said the Englishman: “I can’t imagine anyone fighting for it. I would even bet that they would win every single race.” Last year there were 17 wins in 22 races, 15 of them for the superior world champion Verstappen.
Red Bull team boss Christian Horner initially saw “a great start” to the new season, describing the 23 race weekends as a “marathon”. He expects “that our rivals will come back with all their might” after the show of force at the Bahrain International Circuit. However, Mercedes boss Wolff recognized the result as “a reflection of the test drives” in which Red Bull had already left the strongest impression by far.
Meanwhile, for the silver ones, it’s about not falling out of the top trio of Formula 1 – because after the two Red Bulls, Fernando Alonso in the Aston Martin and Ferrari driver Carlos Sainz finished before the black and white for the first Mercedes – checkered flag was waved. Alonso in particular, who at the age of 41 had his 99th podium in his 359th Grand Prix, seems to be shaking the pecking order – Red Bull ahead of Ferrari ahead of Mercedes – which Wolff also praised for the improvement of the former team from Sebastian Vettel appreciated: “Aston Martin is very fast, they deserve it.”
This increase was rewarded with second place in the constructors’ championship, because Lance Stroll in the second Aston Martin finished sixth – ahead of Russell. Alonso, in turn, overtook Hamilton’s Mercedes and Sainz’ Ferrari on his way to third place in a classic way on the track and not via strategy in the pit lane, which made him enthusiastically say afterwards: “Having the second best car in the first race is just surreal. ” Wolff, on the other hand, summed up the start of the Formula 1 year as a “dramatic wake-up call” that made a radical rethink inevitable. There is no longer any talk of the actual goal of winning world championships again.