“They will win the championship”– Andrew Shovlin warns about the Red Bull threat, as he points out the deficit faced against them.
2021 has started with Red Bull Vs Mercedes with even more tight battles; even though Mercedes have a slight lead over Red Bull in the table, the Milton Keynes based team looks more lethal.
Reflecting on the same observation, Andrew Shovlin, the engineering director at Mercedes, has claimed that Red Bull will be flying away with the championship at this rate.
“I like to think we could have put them under some pressure in the race,” he says. “Whether or not we had the car to win, I don’t know because I don’t know how hard Max was pushing at times.
“But looking at the sectors Lewis was doing and where we were in the corners, we felt it was really close,” he adds. “But we are not going to walk away from this patting ourselves on the back, saying that we might have had the faster car by a small amount.”
“We are walking away from here saying, we are not good enough and they will win the championship if we don’t improve our car very quickly. That is our mind-set, that we are still the ones chasing.”
Mercedes at deficit
At the start of the pre-season testing, it occurred that maybe Mercedes is sandbagging, but with two races into the season, it seems that the Brackley based team have genuine fears.
“We still have a deficit with the car,” said team boss Toto Wolff. “We were on pole, but if Max had put in a decent lap, we were probably 0.25s behind, maybe 0.3s. That is simply what the pecking order is at the moment.
“In the race it was very difficult to judge because of the circumstances, but we had a very good car in the wet and in the drying up. We are slowly starting to understand it, but according to the data we still do not have a car and power unit that can match the Red Bull Honda.”
