"One-year-old Mercedes" has finally showed its true potential - McLaren

Andreas Seidl fears Racing Point's "one-year-old Mercedes" has now shown its true potential that McLaren cannot match.

Sergio Perez finished third quickest at the end of second practice for the Styrian Grand Prix with a lap of one minute 03.877secs, matching the pace in last Saturday's qualifying session for the Austrian Grand Prix at the Red Bull Ring.

Although Lance Stroll was half-a-second adrift of his team-mate, Perez's pace has clearly indicated to Seidl there is more to come this weekend from Racing Point, and that is a concern.

“Seeing what we could do in this session, I’m quite pleased again, because we could confirm again with P5 [Carlos Sainz] and P8 [Lando Norris] on one lap [pace] that we are there," Seidl told Sky Sports F1.

“What is good to see is that I think we are again in the fight with the Ferraris and Renaults, and with one Racing Point [Perez].

“If you look at the cars in front of us, I think we have seen [for] the first time that Racing Point could actually show the potential of the one-year-old Mercedes.

“That was definitely a lap time we could not do, but it was a good session for us.”

Racing Point's RP20 has drawn considerable criticism from rivals after the team opted to copy the design of Mercedes' title-winning car from last season.

Suggested to Seidl the gap between the lead Racing Point of Perez and McLaren was now more realistic, he replied: "Definitely, I would say so.

"As we have always said, if you take last year’s Mercedes and operate it at the optimum potential, we know that we didn’t take this step with the car development on our side over the winter, so it’s just normal what we see from them today.

“At the same time there is at least one car on the Racing Point side that we can fight, and as we know also in the race anything can happen. We saw last weekend that we were not as strong on Friday and could fight them on Sunday, and we will try again.”

A buoyant Perez feels that while Mercedes and Red Bull are still "a step ahead", he is "in the mix" and he "can fight from there".

Before you go...

Mercedes to investigate unhappy Hamilton's pace woes

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