Joe Dunn: I think we are all looking forward to a mammoth season - 23 races! But what are you particularly hoping for in terms of racing?
Mark Hughes: The big hope is that we’ve got at least two teams, preferably three, with nothing between them at the front. It was a season of dominance last year, which I don’t mind really, but each season is different isn’t it? It would be fantastic if we had a competitive Red Bull, Mercedes and Ferrari that are separated by a tenth of a second. That would be the dream, but let’s see.
Johnny Herbert: Yes I agree. Last year we thought we would have a three-way battle and it didn’t quite materialise. It started off with Ferrari doing well, then that sort of petered off and then came the domination of Red Bull – and Mercedes just didn’t get it together. I hope Ferrari and Mercedes have sorted it this year.
MH: You’d think there’s more low-hanging fruit for Mercedes and maybe for Ferrari with the power unit than there is for Red Bull. For Mercedes, although there were lots of symptoms that weren’t good to see, they all seemed to come from the same source. So if they can attend to those problems then they should be somewhere close. For Ferrari, post-Baku after their power unit failures, they ran in significantly detuned form. Now they should be able to dial it back up.
JH: There’s rumours that detuned figure was around 30bhp.
MH: It’s a very sensitive subject. In theory, you can’t do performance developments [because of the freeze in the regulations], but you can do reliability developments. And when it’s more reliable, you can run it harder.
JH: But 30bhp? That’s big.
MH: Yeah. They were implying that they were two-tenths short after Baku to protect the engine. That’s been translated as 30bhp. But it’s not that simple with a hybrid unit, so maybe it’s not 30bhp. But it will be significantly better than it was – perhaps back to pre-Baku levels when it was clearly the fastest and the best engine. But there’s no point in that if it doesn’t last.
VASSEUR’S CHALLENGE
It’s not just reliability for Ferrari. Mercedes was almost the inverse of Ferrari last year in that they had problems with the car, but made the most of what they had. Ferrari had a very good car, but conspired through strategy errors and reliability for it not to work out. Do you think those things will
