THE ‘SHOCK’ THAT GAVE MERCEDES ITS EDGE BACK IN SPAIN
Lewis Hamilton and Mercedes didn’t take it for granted that they would win the 2020 Spanish Grand Prix – and certainly not in the manner in which they ultimately did.
One week on from Max Verstappen’s stunning victory for Red Bull in the 70th Anniversary GP, the reigning champion squad had arrived at the Barcelona track eager to make up for its defeat and looking to put the lessons it had learned as a result into practice. Indeed, the team hadn’t taken a day off – according to team boss Toto Wolff – as they sought to understand the manner of their first defeat of the season “in the office”, despite the punishing 2020 schedule meaning the Spanish race was the end of a second triple-header, with a third looming.
It was always going to be a somewhat different story this time, but Mercedes was nevertheless unnerved by Verstappen’s pace in Friday practice. The long-run data-gathering that takes place in FP2 can never give a full prediction of what will happen in the race, but Verstappen’s 0.291-seconds-per-lap advantage over Hamilton on the medium C2 Pirelli tyre made Mercedes believe he was a real threat once again. Wolff went as far as saying he was the favourite for victory.
In a similar way to the previous event, the start of the race unfolded pretty perfectly for Verstappen. Valtteri Bottas seemed to react well to the lights going out from second on the grid, but felt “Lewis had a tiny bit better reaction”. Then, as he later explained, a small amount of
