It's Ferrari Vs. Mercedes

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What a fantastic race that was. It was the third race in a row where Formula 1 2017 has delivered a really interesting battle. There’s no question about it, the Ferrari vs.Mercedes battle is going to go all the way down to the wire. Another strategic contest and lots of outside factors at play as well. Let’s start from the top.

Bottas shows his class in qualifying

I was really pleased for Valtteri Bottas getting his first pole position in qualifying for the Bahrain GP. He’s a really nice guy, who I’ve known for many years and it underlined that belief that Mercedes had in him to get him into the team. It didn’t quite work out on Sunday for him, but we’ll come back to that. The reality is to out-qualify Lewis Hamilton is no mean feat. It was a really good effort.

Ferrari was the big surprise of qualifying, in terms of how far back they were compared to Mercedes. I think they were surprised as well. It’s interesting how in the first two races they were right up there, but for whatever reason — temperature, circuit-related differences — no one could really pinpoint it. We haven’t really got enough of a data set to draw a trend — we need to see a few more races.

Nico Hulkenberg was the other star of qualifying. It’d be remiss not to mention his performance, which was very, very good — the best of the rest. When you look at the Grand Prix, they don’t seem to have the race pace to match Williams or Force India and I think that’s something they’ll be working on.

A strategy rethink at Mercedes?