Mercedes GP to surprise in Bahrain

Mercedes GP boss Ross Brawn knows how to design winning cars

Q: The lap times seem to suggest that Mercedes is about a second off the pace of Ferrari and McLaren. Are you concerned about that?
Ross Brawn: I don’t think that it is a second. You have to look into the details of what has been done. I think that on our high fuel runs and our race runs, when we get the car right, we are competitive. It’s just a little tricky to get the car right. Michael hasn’t carried out a proper low-fuel qualifying run, but Nico (Rosberg) had a go with lower fuel and it was definitely not bad. He ended the third test day with the best overall time. So I don’t think that we are a second away. As I said before, we are not quite where we would like to be yet, but it’s a moving target. That’s the nature of our business. The team that is leading is always the target for everyone else, and there is only one team that can lead – all the rest have to play catch up. We go through phases of being the leader, and phases of being the ones trying to catch up. At the moment we’ve probably got more catching up to do, but I am not overly concerned.

Q: How will you close the gap?
Ross Brawn We have an update for Bahrain. We decided not to bring it to Barcelona but leave it until the last moment. We’ve learnt to assess and run pieces without testing them. It’s crucial when you have seasons without testing, as you have to bring upgrades to races during the year. In Barcelona we had little bits and pieces, but the major upgrade will be introduced in Bahrain.

Q: How important is it to show off to partners and sponsors during testing?
Ross Brawn: The important thing is to do the work. And that work is to check out the brake system, check out reliability, and obviously check out handling. There is no point running with 20 kilos of fuel all day and looking fantastic. It is in no way representative of what you have, particularly with this year’s new rules, which mean we’ll start the races with a lot of fuel. We need to understand what the car is like on low fuel, but also what the car is like on high fuel. So we just keep our heads down and do our work. It will become apparent who’s done the best job at the first race.