Mercedes’ George Russell says Red Bull are already unbeatable this year as his team considers what to do to close their huge deficit to the front.
Max Verstappen dominated the Bahrain Grand Prix while Lewis Hamilton finished as the best Mercedes in fifth.
Russell, who was seventh, said: “They have this championship sewn up. I don’t think anybody is going to be fighting with them this year.
“They should win every race is my bet with the performance they’ve got.”
Red Bull were challenged by Ferrari in qualifying on Saturday but Verstappen and team-mate Sergio Perez were untouchable in the race even though the Mexican lost a place at the start to Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc.
“They have it easy at the moment and they can do what they like,” Russell said.
“They might not get on pole every race because we know Ferrari are very competitive in qualifying. But when it comes to race pace they are in a very strong position.”
Mercedes left Bahrain accepting that they need to make big changes to their car to try to close up to the front, and that it will take a long time before they can do it.
“If we have to make some drastic changes to give ourselves a shot in the second half of the season, that’s what we’ve got to do,” Russell said.
Hamilton said: “We just have a lot of work to do. We just have to add downforce to the car. We are just lacking a lot of downforce. That’s when the time will come.
“When we put more load on the front and rear we will pick up the pace.”
Both Russell and Hamilton were passed by the Aston Martin of Fernando Alonso in the course of the race, after overtaking him on the first lap.
And Hamilton admitted the fact that Aston buy the engine, gearbox and rear suspension of their car – which has followed Red Bull’s philosophy – and rent the Mercedes wind tunnel to design the rest of it was a salutary lesson.
“Big congrats to Fernando – he did a great job and to the Aston Martin team. They have done such an amazing job. We have work to do because half their car is ours and they do their aero in our wind tunnel.”
Mercedes decided with their new car to stick with their unique aerodynamic philosophy of very narrow sidepods but team boss Toto Wolff admitted that they would have to rethink and come up with a new direction.
Wolff said: “What’s next is a good question and we will tackle it straight at the beginning of the week. Because when you look at where we were at the end of the season, where it seemed like we caught up a lot and it was just matter of which circuits suited us and which not, it seems like we almost doubled if not tripled the gap to Red Bull and this is what we need to look at.
“Everything in between – the Ferrari, the Aston Martin – that’s just a sideshow.
“Having said that, what Aston Martin was able to achieve is a good inspiration because they came back from two seconds off the pace to being second quickest team. And with us everything is bad. The single-lap pace is still good but in the race we saw the consequences and to put it bluntly we are lacking downforce and sliding the tyres and going backwards.
“As a matter of fact, the gap is very big. And in order to catch up you need to make big steps, not the conventional ones by adding a few points [of downforce] every week, because everybody else will do that.
“We have lost a year in development. In order to have a steeper development curve, you just need to take these decisions.
“Aston Martin took that decision and they came back strong. If we start from our base, maybe we can come back strong and chase the Red Bulls. That’s the ambition.”
Wolff said Mercedes would have to decide soon which approach to take to redesigning their car.
“We are still developing one car. But we will decide in the next days and weeks which car [design] that will be.
“It is pretty clear which way we should be going. We just need to make the data work and the most important is re-establishing a solid baseline, say: ‘This is where we are, there are no surprises, and new direction.'”
Russell said he suspected that Mercedes had become so concerned with solving the problem of aerodynamic bouncing – or porpoising – that wrecked their season last year that they had not focused enough on making the car faster.
“You always try to make the best decisions and it’s only when you hit the track you recognise maybe something has caught you off guard.
“Because of our limitations with the porpoising, we put a lot of effort into solving that and it has probably come at the cost of overall performance and downforce.
“We need to be objective. I don’t think we should make any rash decisions. We saw the progress we made last year. There’s no reason why we can’t do it again but the starting point is much lower than we want.”
