F1 | Mercedes, what if it really was a small crisis?

Yet he has accustomed us to having good and bad weather, almost deciding how and when to win, races and world championships. And it's strange, but strange, to see this Mercedes floundering in a very human normality, bowing its head for three races, suffering that red car that has been regularly beaten for years.

And if in Spa and Monza the Anglo-Germans demonstrated a certain vitality in the race, resulting in some ways more complete than the Red team despite being victorious over the distance, Singapore was almost shocking, due to the impotence and submissiveness of the Mercedes. That no longer looked like her.

Even after the free practice in Sochi, a track where the dominant team's redemption is theoretically expected, Brackley's men expressed a certain skepticism and pessimism. Hamilton emphasized the progress of Ferrari and Red Bull, corroborated by technical director James Allison himself, who admitted that the team had done more than one thing wrong in the last few races and had made less progress than the competition. And it is the first time, in the hybrid era, that Mercedes gets something wrong in terms of development. Even more paradoxical is the fact that it is the engine itself that is under accusation (precisely the third specification of the PU), the flagship of the grays until now.

Talking about a crisis for a team that dominated the world championship until the summer is perhaps exaggerated, yet if Hamilton and Bottas also missed the Sochi round, the fasting races in Stuttgart would become four in a row, an unprecedented negative streak in the hybrid era , since 2014 which marked the beginning of the Mercedes dictatorship.

On the one hand, one might think that the team directed by Wolff has loosened its grip, breathed for a moment, perhaps chosen to focus on a future already upon us, to move (once again) ahead of the competition. The titles are in the safe anyway. A choice, however, which does not seem to be in the DNA of a team that has always cared about its winning image, for obvious reasons. A world championship final with rowing boats and a blinding red flash rising like a phoenix on all types of tracks would be equivalent to bad publicity. Nobody likes losing races and having to recover like this, least of all this Mercedes.

But what if the others – for the very first time in years – had been better? An initial response in Russia.

Antonino Rendina

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