Lewis Hamilton on top after Spanish GP practice as Red Bull talent grab rocks Mercedes

[ASFN Admin]

It was another dominant display from Mercedes in Barcelona on Friday. Lewis Hamilton has won every race at the Circuit de Catalunya since 2017 and, after a day in which he and team-mate Valtteri Bottas traded places at the top of the timesheets in first and second practice, few would bet against the seven-time world champion making it five Spanish Grand Prix victories on the trot on Sunday. It was a timely show of strength, too. Mercedes may remain the pre-eminent team in Formula One but for how much longer? The big technical regulation changes coming in next year will give their rivals the opportunity to close the gap but Red Bull are not hanging around. Already applying extreme pressure on the track with their most competitive car in years, the announcement this week that the Milton Keynes-based team had nabbed another five Mercedes engineers for their new in-house Formula One engine facility felt like a power move. The talent grab followed the appointment last month of Mercedes engineer Ben Hodgkinson as technical director of the project and raised further questions about Red Bull’s intentions and the shifting balance of power in the sport. Just what is Red Bull’s game and how significant is this brain drain from Brixworth to Milton Keynes? Potentially hugely, is the answer. The reason Red Bull are doing this is primarily to address the immediate problem of Honda, their engine supplier, quitting the sport next year. By setting up their own power-train operation, Red Bull can service the existing engine, which they are taking over from Honda, and keep it going through to 2025 when the new engine regulations come in. What happens after that is the big question. There have long been rumours that Porsche or Volkswagen may enter the sport and Red Bull could team up with them. But the increasingly ambitious nature of their project suggests rather that they might try to go it alone and design their own power-units lock stock, effectively going head to head with Ferrari and Mercedes as full-on manufacturers.

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