25/03/2019
NEWS STORY
While Lewis Hamilton insisted, right up until the last moment, that it was not "BS", that Ferrari really did have the edge over Mercedes, by the end of the Melbourne weekend we knew this not to be the case, and that somebody had been 'BS-ing', or at the very least sandbagging.
0.7s off the pace in qualifying, fourth and fifth in the race - Sebastian Vettel and Charles Leclerc both almost a minute behind race-winner Valtteri Bottas - and the German 'victim' to Max Verstappen in one of the best overtakes of the race, Ferrari was trounced.
Nonetheless, adopting his default underdog position, Toto Wolff insists there is a long, long way to go.
"Claiming the maximum 44 points race from the first race was a fantastic result, we could not have asked for a better start to the season," he admits. "But the fight has only just begun: Ferrari will try everything they can to hit back and Melbourne showed that Red Bull will have something to say in the fight, too.
"We've seen the potential of Ferrari's package in Barcelona," he continues, "so we expect them to come back strong in Bahrain, with Red Bull in the mix as well.
"We will see a very different race in Bahrain, where the weekend presents unique challenges, especially the change in conditions between the sessions. FP1 and FP3 take place in the middle of the day when both the air and the track can be very hot; FP2, Qualifying and the Race on the other hand are held in the evening in considerably cooler temperatures. These temperature swings make it very tricky to set up the car and find the right configuration for the sessions that really count.
"After the Barcelona test, we felt that we were the challengers," he says. "Whatever the Melbourne result says, our mind-set hasn't changed since then. One race doesn't determine the pecking order for the rest of the season.
"We need to extract every bit of performance from our package and keep on working hard to improve the car over the weekend to be competitive. We've had some great racing in recent years in Bahrain, so I'm looking forward to an exciting weekend."
Despite Bottas' commanding win in Australia, Lewis Hamilton is marginally favoured by bookmakers at 13/8 compared to Bottas' price of 9/4 (odds from My Betting Sites).