Mercedes - neither us nor Red Bull will "run away" with F1 title this year

Mercedes believe "there is everything to play for" this season and that neither it nor bitter rivals Red Bull will "run away" with the F1 title.

After just two grands prix, the signs are clear that unlike the past seven seasons that have been dominated by Mercedes, F1 is set to have a title fight it has long craved, and between two sensational drivers in Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen.

The likelihood is the fight will ebb and flow depending on which car suits which track, with Mercedes at present attempting to scratch away at Red Bull's early-season advantage.

Believing "more consistent pressure" was applied at the last race in Imola compared to the season opener in Bahrain, trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin said: "You could look at the qualifying [in Imola] and say they [Red Bull] should have perhaps locked out the front row looking at their laps.

"But I am not sure we got everything out of our package. We were struggling with tyre temperature, we could have perhaps done a better job there.

“However, two races in, it feels to me like there is everything to play for in this. We know that we need to make the car quicker. We know we need to work on all the fine detail.

"I don’t think [in Imola] we necessarily did a perfect job and there is certainly a lot of work to do.

“But it certainly feels like this is going to be an exciting championship. It doesn’t feel like one where either of us is going to run away with it in terms of performance.

"We are working hard to develop the car in the next few races and hopefully, we will bring some useful improvements.”

Shovlin has confirmed that given the slow tyre warm-up that particularly affected Valtteri Bottas in the cooler, wet conditions, a review has been ongoing.

"A lot of cars use the heat generated from the brakes, and bear in mind that the brakes can run at 800, 900 degrees towards the end of a braking event," added Shovlin.

"They can channel that heat into the wheel rims which then gets its way into the rubber of the tyres and can bring them up to temperature.

"This allows you to sort of push and pull the warm-up, but it tends to give you a bit more degradation on a long run.

"Now, this is a tuning tool that a lot of the teams were using and it may be that we need to look at how powerful the effect is to which we can heat the tyres and whether there is more that we need to do going forward in that regard.

"But it is one of those areas that we are going to review ahead of the next race.”

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