Why engine caution wasn't the biggest factor in Mercedes' Abu Dhabi defeat

To hear that Red Bull has defeated the mighty Mercedes squad suggests a Formula 1 race of great excitement has taken place.

It calls to mind Max Verstappen's brilliant win in the 70th Anniversary Grand Prix back in the summer, where the Dutchman executed an excellent mix of strategy and wheel-to-wheel superiority to take down two overall faster cars - winning with style and panache.

But the 2020 Abu Dhabi GP was an altogether different affair.

The race itself was turgid and lifeless, although this doesn't not detract from Verstappen and Red Bull's brilliance. They simply dominated the event - in a way that was all very Mercedes-esque - winning from pole and leading every lap.

The previous five F1 races at the Yas Marina track had been won from pole, and qualifying was again a key factor in Verstappen's victory. The circuit layout has never created mass overtaking - something Fernando Alonso, in the Abu Dhabi track 'biosphere' to perform a series of demonstration runs with his 2005 title-winning R25 last weekend, would no doubt remember as he got reacquainted with the Renault squad that cost him the 2010 world title at this venue, when he was unable to pass Vitaly Petrov. So, by topping qualifying, Red Bull had stolen an early march.

But there was still plenty of reason to expect a Mercedes fightback given the W11's pace pedigree and the lengthy, 21-turn track having the kind of varied layout where the team traditionally excels. Plus, Alex Albon had qualified the second RB16 in fifth, which increased Mercedes' chances of taking down Verstappen with a two-pronged attack - as it successfully did at Imola.

Then there was the start - a phase of the race where all three of the leading contenders have struggled at times in 2020. But last Sunday, they all reacted well and were quickly up to speed. Verstappen was able to drift towards the middle of the circuit to ward off the threat of a dive at the Turn 1 left-hander and on the exit of the corner Bottas had a slight slide, which let the Red Bull scamper clear.

Verstappen's first lap was so good he led by 1.441 seconds at the end of it, with the fight soon settling down to a two-horse race, with Hamilton - still enduring the after effects of COVID-19 - always a consistent chunk behind his team-mate.

"I don't think I've ever been so blown," he said afterwards. "My body is not feeling great. But look on the bright side: I made it through and I didn't think anytime last week I would be here. So I am truly grateful for my health and to be alive."

The first stint, during which all three leaders were running the medium tyres, again having aced the middle phase of qualifying to get through on the more durable rubber, lasted 10 laps of the race's 55-tour total.

It really ended on lap nine when Sergio Perez was forced to park up his Racing Point exiting the Turn 19 left-hander, which brings the cars out from underneath the behemothic W Hotel in the track's third sector. It capped a rollercoaster final triple header of 2020 for Perez, a winner a week previously, but who had come into the race carrying grid penalties that would require him to start at the back after taking a fresh engine ahead of practice.

"The car was really good today. Just a good balance and then [with that] you can also look after your tyres. I could then build a gap all the way through the race" Max Verstappen

"We had the MGU-K issue again," Perez told Autosport, referring to the issue that had caused his fiery retirement from the Bahrain GP. "It is a shame as we really needed a strong race but unfortunately we didn't have that. It was looking good [Perez had gained five places in the opening eight laps] and I was making a lot of progress and all of a sudden I start losing engine power."

Perez's stricken car needed recovering, which the FIA initially thought could be covered under a virtual safety car. But, as race director Michael Masi later explained: "The car was stuck and wouldn't move, very simply. It's fortunate that it was near a gap, but couldn't roll. And with the requirement for a JCB, we would always do that under a full safety car."

So that is what appeared. Verstappen's lead, which had been 3.273s at the end of lap nine, was erased. He had been doing a solid jump of gradually pulling away from Bottas, edging the opening phase of the race by 0.229s per lap to the Finn and 0.687s to Hamilton.

The leaders had been called into the pits while the race was still neutralised under the VSC, with all three moving from the mediums to the hards, in line with the pre-race expectation that the event would be a one-stopper. But the safety car's appearance offered Bottas a second go at jumping Verstappen with the pack closed up.

Verstappen, however, simply aced the restart. By the time he had led the pack around again at the end of lap 14, his lead was 1.465s and from there he really never looked under pressure again. There were times when Bottas was able to steal back a few tenths or so, but these generally coincided with Verstappen encountering backmarkers later in the race.

The Red Bull was able to lap firmly in the low-mid 1m41s to the flag, with the Mercedes duo usually in the mid-high 1m41s. All told, Verstappen's second stint average (not including the final lap, where Bottas shipped nearly three seconds) was 1m41.478s - 0.304s quicker than Bottas and 0.4s over Hamilton, the world champion clearly the second fastest Mercedes driver on the day.

Verstappen did have one moment of concern, reporting with just over 10 laps remaining that he was feeling significant vibrations as the rubber on his tyres wore down, urging Red Bull to check it was seeing the same thing in its data.

"I was thinking back a little bit to Spa but also of course Imola [where a sudden tyre failure put Verstappen out]," he said. "I was keeping an eye on it on every straight. But, luckily, all good. The pace was still there. The tyres were still performing."

Verstappen eventually came home 15.976s clear of Bottas, notching up his 10th F1 win and his second from pole.

"We had a decent start and from there onwards I could manage the gap and could look after my tyres," he explained. "And then of course the safety car came out at a little bit of an unfortunate time because we then had to do a very long stint on the hard.

"Luckily, the tyre coped with it, but you still have to manage it a bit more. The car was really good today. Just a good balance and then [with that] you can also look after your tyres. I could then build a gap all the way through the race."

Mercedes' defeat really started in qualifying, where the team's trackside engineering director, Andrew Shovlin, said it had "not managed to land the soft compound in quite the right window".

"We know that that soft tyre is quite a fiddly tyre, sometimes we get it in a really good window, sometimes we don't," he explained after the race. "But the whole of Saturday was a struggle. I think in a way we did well to get the cars second and third, and within a sniff of being on pole, because this was a race where to win it, you had to be on pole."

There was another factor Mercedes was aware of going into the race that, while the team insisted was not the main reason for its defeat, certainly meant it was not operating the W11 to its maximum potential.

Team boss Toto Wolff had spoken of a "gremlin" sitting in its power unit - concerning the MGU-K. As well as costing Perez his third place in the Bahrain GP, and appearing to have caused his retirement on his final outing for Racing Point, George Russell's return to Williams in practice last Friday ended in a cloud of smoke and concerns about his car's electrical state due a problem in the same area. As a result, Wolff said after qualifying the decision had been made to take "a bit of performance out of it, on all the Mercedes engines" in the field.

"It was all balancing it out and at some point we [realised we] couldn't keep up with them and we needed to try and get to the finish" Valtteri Bottas

But the team reckoned this was only worth less than a tenth per lap - "not the difference between first and second", according to Shovlin - and this goes some way to explaining why the two Mercedes drivers were seemingly unaware their cars were down on power in the press conference.

"Honestly, I wasn't aware that the engine was turned down," Bottas replied when Autosport asked about Wolff's words regarding the MGU-K issue. Hamilton said he "wasn't aware of that, personally", but felt in light of the problems at the customer squads "if they have done something then it would make sense".

Given the negligible impact the team feels its decision to operate its engines "as conservative as we could be in order to try and avoid a problem," per Shovlin again, the true reason for its defeat lies elsewhere.

The early safety car period had essentially forced the pack onto the same strategy, with everyone other than Daniel Ricciardo, the two Ferraris, Antonio Giovinazzi and Kevin Magnussen piling in to take the hard tyres during the race suspension.

The game was therefore all about getting the white-walled tyres working best and keeping them alive to the finish. And Red Bull simply did this better than Mercedes.

"[I was pushing] always with a margin because you knew that you had to do quite a lot of laps," explained Verstappen. "And then basically I was just looking at what the guys behind me were doing and of course I was trying to build a little bit of a gap.

"Just every lap trying to get a bit out of it to have a bit of a safety margin in case your tyres suddenly drop or whatever. But you couldn't go flat out anyway on this track, you cannot do that because it's just too hard on tyres and the last sector is quite tough."

There's no doubt the Mercedes duo will have been impacted by running behind Verstappen too, sliding more on their aging rubber due to the dirty air factor. But throughout the race, Bottas said he "tried everything I could, and I noticed pretty early on in the first stint that Max and Red Bull had more pace".

His first stint had been hampered by a slight handling imbalance, which left Bottas with a bit of an understeer problem. But Mercedes was able to adjust this at his pitstop and he was happier with the balance following the restart, although Verstappen was able to edge away at a faster rate than before.

Mercedes had spent the only practice session that was representative for the race given the day/night timetable - FP2 - running a different programme as it decided to spend more time understanding the prototype 2021 Pirellis during that session's traditional long-run data-gathering period. This was in any case impacted by Kimi Raikkonen's Alfa Romeo catching fire dramatically (the Finn took a slightly longer than ideal to jump out after his radio cable was briefly stuck in his cockpit, which Masi said was then "looked at immediately and rectified" ahead of FP3) as the long runs were disrupted across the grid.

But Mercedes still expected to match Verstappen come the race and was surprised that in the end it came up short.

"What made it difficult was that I could see that Max was pulling a gap and of course at the end I didn't want that gap to grow too much," Bottas said of his second stint. "I tried to keep up, at the same time trying to make sure we made it to the end. It was all balancing it out and at some point we [realised we] couldn't keep up with them and we needed to try and get to the finish. If we had to do two stops, we would have been a lot slower overall so there were not many options."

The W11 therefore ends up with four defeats in the 17-race season, after which it will be largely carried over to 2021 thanks to the coronavirus cost-saving measures. But Mercedes has not added anything to unlock performance to the car since the Belgian GP. Nevertheless, the manner of its defeat last weekend is to be considered "a slap on the wrist", by Wolff.

But Perez's retirement, Renault's lowly qualifying and McLaren's near perfectly executed weekend meant the battle to settle third place in the constructors' championship did not end up with a grandstand finish

"It wasn't a great weekend for us, but [the W11 is] a car that has never let us down all year, maybe apart from this last weekend," he added. "Whether it will be the greatest car, I don't know. I hope next year's or the one after next year's car will be the greatest Mercedes racing car."

It was reasonably clear from early in the second stint that Verstappen had the edge on the Mercedes duo, barring anything unforeseen happening. Attention therefore turned to the battle to settle third place in the constructors' championship. But Perez's retirement, Renault's lowly qualifying and McLaren's near perfectly executed weekend meant this battle did not end up with a grandstand finish.

Lando Norris had lost the fine fourth he had earned in qualifying to Albon on lap six when the Red Bull driver made a nice move to the inside of Turn 8 at the end of the main straight, but considering the RB16 is a faster car overall there was no shame in this. Norris ran adrift of Ricciardo through his second stint to when the Renault driver finally came in for the first time on lap 39, finishing in a solid fifth place.

The contra-strategy required Ricciardo to keep up his pace as his long first stint wore on, which he did magnificently, but it was only enough to help him climb from 10th in the early stages - after he'd been allowed through by now former team-mate Esteban Ocon - to seventh behind Carlos Sainz Jr.

Sainz's solid sixth place was threatened by a post-race investigation into his driving in the pitlane under the VSC, where McLaren had double stacked its cars. He'd come in and out just in front of Racing Point's Lance Stroll and was under suspicion of having driven too slowly while Norris was being serviced.

But the stewards accepted Sainz's explanation that the approximate five seconds he drove between the pitlane's 80km/h limit at 70km/h was because he was "exercising a degree of caution" due to the high number of mechanics in the pitlane as the pack piled in.

"We estimate this resulted in car 55 arriving at the pitstop around 0.6s later than if it had maintained a speed of 80 km/h," the stewards explained, with Stroll ultimately delayed by "approximately one second" and therefore no action was required.

"I don't know why even there's a discussion," Sainz said afterwards. "The only thing I did was to be very cautious in the pitlane and I think we executed a perfect race and we managed to bring home P3 in the championship, which is great for the team."

In the end, the 2020 F1 season did not end with a bang - going out with a rather dull affair considering all the potential flashpoints the pre-race grid and pre-event standings had pointed towards.

But, considering the year it has been, for us all, there was delight to be found in simply having a season finale in the first place.