Johnny Herbert: After doom and gloom about Lewis Hamilton, Ferrari showed all you need is zoom

On top of the world | Sebastian Vettel did not excel in qualifying by took the chequered flag in Melbourne
SAEED KHAN/AFP/Getty Images
Johnny Herbert7 April 2017

If Formula One’s new owners were looking for the spark to light up the new era for the sport, they found it in Melbourne. After years of Red Bull dominating followed by Mercedes’ spell sweeping all and sundry aside, we have a proper championship battle on our hands.

It’s only one race into a marathon 20-race season but already it looks like we have two clear protagonists in that title battle in Sebastian Vettel and Lewis Hamilton, the two grateful recipients of those passages of dominance.

And there may be two more come China: Kimi Raikkonen struggled with understeer in Australia while Valtteri Bottas has only had a few days in the Mercedes against the quickest driver in F1. Both will get better in their respective cars.

I know Red Bull have downplayed themselves and they were very much third best, but you’d write them off at your peril. They’ve got some big upgrades coming and, despite them saying otherwise, I expect them to feature right up there in the third race in Bahrain. So that title battle has the prospect of going from two to four to six.

In the past, I’ve spoken about how Melbourne can be a real anomaly of a track, that it throws up results we don’t expect which aren’t necessarily indicative of the season that lies ahead. But with regards to Ferrari and Vettel in particular that simply isn’t the case.

You can’t overplay how much of a turnaround they’ve made — it’s been massive. They had a huge deficit to Mercedes last season and now they genuinely have a car to match Mercedes, maybe even surpass them.

One race in, we simply don’t know but what’s clear from the moment they first rolled out the Ferrari in testing, it worked. I’ve always said in testing that it’s pretty clear from the off whether it’s a good or great car. For 2017, it appears to be great and the timesheets don’t lie — they were pretty much at the top from the off. That’s quite telling.

Okay, so they don’t have the ultimate pace, as we saw in qualifying. After Saturday, a few people were doom and gloom that Lewis was going to walk away with the championship but Ferrari have the pace that matters… race pace.

Seb did enough to stay on Lewis’ coat tails and the key facet to Ferrari’s strength was their tyre wear. Lewis made no secret over the team radio and in his interviews after the race that he was struggling with tyre degradation. In Australia, the Ferraris were pretty kind to the Pirelli rubber. And the way that China works, I’d expect Ferrari to be the team to beat there as well.

There’s long corners there that push the outside of the tyres and there’s never enough time to allow those tyres to properly cool. Ferrari have all the right ingredients to deal with such issues and win back-to-back grands prix for the first time since 2010.

I know people bemoaned the lack of overtaking at Albert Park — there were no more than a couple of overtakes all race — but it’s always been like that since the race moved to Melbourne in 1996. I remember being in the Sauber one year behind Jacques Villeneuve’s Williams and I had the chance early on to overtake but didn’t quite commit.

I thought to myself, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get another chance’ but I didn’t for the rest of the race. That’s just the sort of place it is. So I don’t think we can suddenly turn around and blame the new cars for a lack of overtaking at this stage, although that may yet prove to be the case.

McLaren about to get progress report

China can be a brutal track at highlighting a car’s deficiencies. I think McLaren surprised a lot of people after a very tough winter and all the problems with the Honda engine in how they eventually fared in Melbourne. For a time, it looked like Fernando Alonso might be in the points. But China will fully lay bare how much they’re lacking from their power unit, and it could be a very telling weekend for the team as they struggle to get back to where they once were. In China, we’ll get a true indication of the picture of things for Alonso and Co.

What I’d say is that visually the cars look so much better and what’s great is that we have a proper race for the championship from two drivers within two different teams. Genuinely, I believe Bottas will become a title contender.

I was properly impressed with how critical he was on himself despite shadowing his new team-mate to third place in his first race for his new team. It shows his out-and-out hunger to do the job.

There’s no shortage of motivation for him. Firstly, he has the job of trying to beat the quickest guy out there in the same machinery, but what’s good is that the threat of Ferrari and, in time, Red Bull, ensures he doesn’t get obsessed with the inter-team battle and his mind is focused on the other challenges out there. For now, though, it’s Seb v Lewis and that’s plenty to get excited about.

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