Is Red Bull F1's only hope of a Mercedes challenge in 2020?

In another age, before the expected 2020 calendar was swept away by the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting lockdowns, six days of pre-season testing at Barcelona provided a theoretical guide to this year's Formula 1 pecking order.

Anybody hoping for clear signs that Mercedes had suddenly produced a dud with the W11 was left disappointed, as the team that has claimed all 12 titles since 2014 topped the times at both three-day tests. But there was delicious drama behind - indeed, in the back of the W11, as Mercedes twice had to swap engines as reliability problems dogged the reigning champion squad, and impacted customer team Williams.

But it was the team that has finished directly behind Mercedes in the past three constructors' championships that sounded particularly downbeat about its chances. Ferrari spent the two Barcelona tests running a programme that was focused on fully understanding the SF1000 and not getting carried away with headline times and race runs, which had led to so much dashed hope at the start of 2019.

The car looked to be giving Charles Leclerc and Sebastian Vettel a hard time through the corners and was down on straightline pace. Ferrari's settlement with the FIA regarding its 2019 power-unit arrangement perhaps explained the latter issue, which was set to be a major point of controversy over the Australian Grand Prix weekend before a rather more serious problem struck that race down.

As if to deliberately underline Ferrari's harsh reality, team principal Mattia Binotto insisted it was "not hiding" performance and that "it seems our main competitors are certainly faster".

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As a result of Binotto's use of a plural in that final point, it is the team bearing the same name as the track that will now host the 2020 season opener (and the second race, the Styrian GP) that must be expected to be Mercedes' closest challenger. Red Bull is on a hot streak at its home track, where Max Verstappen has been victorious in two entertaining races over the past two years, and where Mercedes has struggled.

Although the Silver Arrows squad was struck down by hydraulics and fuel-pressure problems in 2018, and cooling issues significantly hampered its pace last year, two wins in the two most recent races at the Red Bull Ring are a good omen for the Christian Horner-run team.

"It's been a great circuit for us the past couple of years," he says, before naturally refusing to get carried away. "Mercedes have underperformed there the past couple of years, but we don't take anything for granted.

"They still head into the season very much as the favourites. They certainly had the strongest form in pre-season testing. But hopefully we can push them quite hard at the circuit that has been good for us."

"The normal process has continued because a lot of the development was in the pipeline following the testing, which would have been introduced at Zandvoort" Christian Horner

Red Bull's form in pre-season testing was harder to read, but the team exuded a quiet confidence as it went about completing its Barcelona programme. Verstappen put the squad second in the overall times, 0.537 seconds adrift of Valtteri Bottas's best, but he set his quickest time on the C4 Pirelli testing rubber - one step harder than the C5s on the Mercedes driver's machine.

The RB16 looked absolutely planted when viewed trackside at Barcelona, and the fact that Red Bull avoided using the softest rubber to set its quickest time (and Alex Albon's best was 19th in the combined times) suggests the team was trying to keep its full performance under wraps.

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There were still issues as both Verstappen and Albon had several spins, although high winds and a damp start, which preceded Verstappen pirouetting off and causing a red flag on the penultimate day of testing, were offered as explanations. Indeed, if Red Bull's 2020 challenger had some sort of innate balance issue, it surely wouldn't have looked so strong in trackside observations (where Mercedes also seemed mighty).

"I think we had a good pre-season," says Horner. "It felt like Mercedes still are a sniff ahead. But it's all going to come down to the rate of development. And obviously Honda's evolution as well.

"I'm sure the top teams will all be bringing updates that would have normally been [added on] in the early European season, and it's going to be about how much that is worth. Who's going to be putting on the most performance onto their cars?"

This brings us to an interesting point of consideration. The cars that take to the track in practice for the Austrian GP tomorrow won't be exactly the same as the ones that left Barcelona in February.

The pandemic lockdowns may have brought the summer shutdown forward to the spring, and this was extended from three weeks to nine, but the teams had improvements ready to go following testing, and indeed had the season started as expected they would have added more design tweaks when the action returned to Europe for the now cancelled Dutch Grand Prix.

"The normal process has continued because a lot of the development was in the pipeline following the testing, which would have been introduced at Zandvoort," explains Horner, "or updates that would have also happened in Vietnam [the expected race before the Dutch GP once the Chinese GP was called off]. So, they all get rolled up and packaged into what will appear on the car in Austria."

This situation applies to all teams, so we can look forward to the opening practice sessions being particularly busy as the field assesses whether the upgrades work as expected. And as the bigger teams generally bring constant upgrades to races given their greater levels of resources, putting that all on at the same time raises the prospect of much of the testing picture being refreshed.

Binotto was adamant that his squad was behind Mercedes and Red Bull in February, but at the same time he insisted Ferrari would be back on terms as the season wore on.

When asked how he reacted to Binotto's assertions about Ferrari's pace in winter testing, which effectively heaped the pressure on Red Bull to take the fight to Mercedes, Horner says: "Obviously we have analysis available to us - that we all do - with the GPS overlays. And you could see that they'd taken a significant hit in straightline performance from where they were last year.

"But I'm sure they've worked hard during the interim, and I'm sure they'll be a contender as we head into Austria, but certainly in pre-season, you could see that they were down on performance from 12 months previously."

By anyone's assessment - be they Red Bull, Ferrari, even Autosport - it is Mercedes that heads to the two Austrian races as the benchmark. It has six years of success as proof of its potential, plus its now proven track record of keeping its mantle as F1's best through regulation resets.

"It's going to be a smash-and-grab kind of season this year, with prolonged development that goes through with this car carried over into next year" Christian Horner

So, Mercedes can also be expected to have developed the W11 through the coronavirus delay. Like Red Bull, it had upgrades ready to add in the spring events - and it has something of a score to settle at the Red Bull Ring.

"If you imagine where the launch car was and the car that would have gone to Australia - that was frozen around Christmas," Mercedes technical director James Allison recently explained.

"There was the whole of January, whole of February, March, all making the car quicker in the windtunnel and also in the design departments. We had quite a lot of ideas about how to make it quicker, and quite a lot of those ideas were already in process through the design office before we were forced to shut down.

"Our challenge now is to make sure that quarter of a year of development can get off the drawing boards and onto the car as swiftly as possible. We hope to have a chunk of that for the first race in Austria, and the season that follows will take as much of the development as fast as we can get it onto the car in turn."

The 2020 F1 season is going to be very different from what we were all expecting. The pandemic is far from over, and the fact that races are set to take place at all is testament to the hard work and protocols the championship's stakeholders have established to make sure F1 can visit various countries safely.

But it certainly will not be the record-breaking 22-race length that had been anticipated, and there are no guarantees the season will reach the "15 to 22" event target set by F1 CEO Chase Carey. Further developments in the pandemic could yet stop the championship traversing the globe, especially when moving on from the European summer events that will be tackled first.

Although they will be two separate competitions, the 2020 and 2021 campaigns are now also intrinsically linked by the pandemic, as the current cars will be kept on for a second season as a cost-saving measure. The teams will be able to make two developments via a token-upgrade system in agreement with the FIA for 2021 (McLaren must spend tokens on adapting its MCL35 to the Mercedes engines it will run from 2021), but essentially what they have now, and how they can adapt it over the coming months, is locked in until the latest rules reset is finally brought in for 2022.

"We've effectively got a year and a half to get out of these cars," says Horner. "So it's going to be a smash-and-grab kind of season this year, with prolonged development that goes through with this car carried over into next year."

Red Bull has had one advantage ahead of the Austrian GP. It was the only 'Class A' team to conduct a run with its 2020 challenger in preparation for the new season opener, although it was a designated filming day, which means a 100km limit to running conducted on demonstration tyres. Mercedes and Ferrari were limited to tests with their 2018 cars at Silverstone and Mugello respectively.

The purpose of these runs was largely to test the new safety protocols required for what F1 sporting director Ross Brawn called a "biosphere", which means physical distancing for team members wearing personal protective equipment. But that doesn't mean the Red Bull boss missed an opportunity to score a psychological point regarding last week's run.

"It was good to get them doing some of the basics again - pitstops and some of the fundamentals just to blow away the cobwebs," explains Horner. "It was a useful exercise. Good to see the cars running again and good to see the team straight back down to sub-two-second pitstops."

"Certainly in the hybrid era, it's been our best off-season. Our second year in our relationship with Honda feels more integrated, and they're very much part of the team now" Christian Horner

Horner isn't done laying down markers ahead of the new campaign, referencing Red Bull's most recent title-winning year when asked to offer his expectations for the season ahead.

"It's going to be intense," he says. "Races are going to come thick and fast. And it feels that we're going into the season better prepared - or that it's the best we've been prepared since probably 2013.

"Certainly in the hybrid era, it's been our best off-season. Our second year in our relationship with Honda feels more integrated, and they're very much part of the team now. And we're excited - we're really excited to go racing."

After so much tragedy and heartbreak, we look again to sport to provide much needed relief. If Red Bull can reach the heights it most recently scaled in 2013 and take the fight to Mercedes, then however long the 2020 season lasts it will be even more noteworthy for motorsport historians.

As the cliche goes, come the end of qualifying on Saturday, we'll have the clearest indication yet regarding F1's new reality.