Why Mercedes could have as much as a second in hand

For the third time in the last four races, Red Bull were the quickest team in second practice on Friday. But Daniel Ricciardo is convinced Mercedes is actually the team to beat in Canada.

It’s not hard to see why. Mercedes brought fewer sets of the hyper-softs than their rivals, having only done limited running on the tyre in pre-season testing before their selection had to be made for this fly-away race. It turned out they had erred on the conservative side.

So while the quickest Mercedes ended Friday half a second off Max Verstappen’s pace-setting RB14, they can expect a performance gain which should more than cancel out that deficit when they run the hyper-softs for the first time on Saturday.

How much? Pirelli expected the hyper-soft would be nine-tenths of a second quicker than the ultra-soft, but yesterday’s running indicated the performance gain is more like 1.1 seconds. That will vary between teams, but it indicates Mercedes has ample time in hand even before we begin considering the extra one-lap performance it can get from its engine in qualifying.

So far Mercedes’ best time is 1.3 seconds off what it managed last year. That’s the worst of any team bar Williams, who are having another awful weekend, and much of it is likely to come from them not having run the hyper-softs yet. For comparison, Ferrari are 0.5s off their 2017 pace and Red Bull are already 0.2s quicker than last year.

Ferrari are not to be underestimated, however. Based on their usual Friday form and Kimi Raikkonen’s comments about being happier with his car’s set-up, expect Sebastian Vettel to be in contention for pole position once he’s moved closer to Raikkonen’s settings and the team turns up its (upgraded) engines for qualifying.

The increased performance gain from the hyper-soft tyres will have consequences for qualifying and race strategy. It will make it harder for front-running teams to reach Q3 on the harder, ultra-soft tyres, in the hope of gaining a strategic advantage by starting on them.

But there is a clear potential benefit of not starting on the hyper-soft. That high performance comes at the expense of a short life. It’s also weight-sensitive, so running it with a high fuel load is not ideal.

“The hyper-soft is an aggressive choice here,” said Pirelli sporting director Mario Isola. “If we are aggressive with the choice the performance is there but the degradation is something they have to manage during the stint.”

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Trying to get through Q2 on ultra-softs could be a gamble worth taking, said Isola. “I believe that is quite a big risk,” he said.

“Somebody maybe will take the risk because they want to start the race on the ultra-soft and they want to have the opportunity to run the race on the ultra and the super. But considering the performance delta between the ultra and the hyper, they take a risk.”

Problems with the local wildlife notwithstanding, Romain Grosjean put Haas at the front of the midfield on Friday. He was 1.4s off the pole-sitters pace, which serves to underline why it will be a close call for the front-runners to try to get through Q2 on ultra-softs which are potentially 1.1s slower, particularly when track evolution is taken into account.

Having gone well in first practice, McLaren were little quicker in the second session, but Fernando Alonso clearly has good reason to believe they can fight for a place in Q3 again.

Could Sauber be contenders for Q3? Charles Leclerc was optimistic about their potential at this track, they’ve posted the biggest year-on-year improvement of any team so far (0.6s) and he was less than two-hundredths of a second off the top 10 in second practice. That’s a particularly credible showing for a driver who hasn’t raced at this track before.

Much the same can be said for Brendon Hartley, who was only five-thousandths off Leclerc in his Toro Rosso. It’s an encouraging indication about the potential of Honda’s upgrade. (Before practice began, Nico Hulkenberg said Renault’s B-spec engine only gave them “a little bit more power”.)

But for proof of how close the fight to get into Q3 will be, note that Stoffel Vandoorne was only three-tenths of a second off his team mate, yet they had six cars between them.

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Longest stint comparison – second practice

This chart shows all the drivers’ lap times (in seconds) during their longest unbroken stint. Very slow laps omitted. Scroll to zoom, drag to pan, right-click to reset:

Complete practice times

Pos	Driver	Car	FP1	FP2	Total laps
1	Max Verstappen	Red Bull-TAG Heuer	1’13.302	1’12.198	65
2	Kimi Raikkonen	Ferrari	1’13.727	1’12.328	70
3	Daniel Ricciardo	Red Bull-TAG Heuer	1’13.518	1’12.603	41
4	Lewis Hamilton	Mercedes	1’13.390	1’12.777	68
5	Sebastian Vettel	Ferrari	1’13.574	1’12.985	43
6	Valtteri Bottas	Mercedes	1’13.617	1’13.061	71
7	Romain Grosjean	Haas-Ferrari	1’15.119	1’13.620	55
8	Esteban Ocon	Force India-Mercedes	1’15.071	1’13.747	69
9	Sergio Perez	Force India-Mercedes		1’13.754	40
10	Fernando Alonso	McLaren-Renault	1’13.900	1’13.866	57
11	Charles Leclerc	Sauber-Ferrari	1’15.439	1’13.884	69
12	Brendon Hartley	Toro Rosso-Honda	1’15.756	1’13.889	80
13	Kevin Magnussen	Haas-Ferrari	1’15.579	1’13.956	60
14	Nico Hulkenberg	Renault		1’13.967	40
15	Marcus Ericsson	Sauber-Ferrari	1’15.386	1’14.108	71
16	Carlos Sainz Jnr	Renault	1’14.116	1’14.433	33
17	Stoffel Vandoorne	McLaren-Renault	1’14.311	1’14.167	33
18	Pierre Gasly	Toro Rosso-Honda	1’15.004	1’14.486	70
19	Lance Stroll	Williams-Mercedes	1’16.259	1’14.703	56
20	Sergey Sirotkin	Williams-Mercedes	1’15.768	1’14.782	65
21	Nicholas Latifi	Force India-Mercedes	1’17.145		28

Quotes: Dieter Rencken

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