Conclusions From The Spanish GP

It could be now or never for Fernando
If Fernando Alonso doesn't win a third title this year, he probably never will whilst clad in the scarlet of the Scuderia. The difference between the F2012 and the F138 is night and day. If last year's charger was a misbehaving dog that Alonso had to manhandle to remain in title contention, then, judging by Sunday's grand prix, this year's model is a powerful beast he has already mastered. Still, it's not without fault. The F138 lacks bark in qualifying trim and this weakness may become especially apparent in Monaco in two weeks' time. That said, Alonso's declaration that Mercedes are the favourites to win around the mean streets of the Principality at the end of the month was probably as much a hurry-up message to his own team as a bona fide expectation - and also served, given that he had lapped the Mercedes of Lewis Hamilton just an hour or so beforehand, as a concise commentary on the near-farcical state F1 was reduced to this weekend when outright pace became a matter of irrelevancy. Yet it must be a statistic of considerable assurance for Alonso that none of the last eight grands prix have been won from pole position. Reassuring and self-fulfilling given that Ferrari's 2012 experiences have left them so adept at overcoming modest Saturdays. At Barcelona, they stole a march on their rivals by planning for a four-stop strategy as early as Friday; Red Bull, by critical contrast, only abandoned hope of three-stopping midway through Sebastian Vettel's second stint. But with that acclaim is thus carried a line of caution. If Ferrari have a better grasp of the tyres than Red Bull, they have more to lose if Pirelli bow to public pressure and plump for change. Keep a close eye on the politics to follow. Back to the Brackley drawing board
What now for Mercedes? The reduced demands of Monaco should, in theory, offer temporal relief from their tyre-eating woes but the greedy W04 was so obese in Barcelona that the the Mercedes design team must have scurried back to back to the Brackley drawing-board straight from the airport. This is getting embarrassing and not just costly. Solutions are easier mused than applied, of course, and yet the W04's flaw must, as remarked before and was acknowledged by Toto Wolff in Mercedes' own post-race briefing, be a fundamental matter of compromise. Boiled down, the suspicion remains that whatever causes the W04 to be so very quick on Saturday is also one of the reasons why they are so relatively slow on Sundays. Balance is everything in F1 and in a year in which qualifying has been pushed to the periphery of relevance, Mercedes' priorities have been exposed as totally askew. Mark needs to deliver
Mark Webber has been written off before, but after Esteban Gutierrez's overdue arrival as a proper F1 performer in Barcelona, the Australian will journey to Monaco as the driver under the most pressure to deliver. The number says it all: 0-5 down to team-mate Sebastian Vettel in qualifying, Webber has scored less than half the points Vettel has registered this term and trails the German by five places in the Drivers' Championship. It can't go on like this. Static regulations leave the strugglers with no wriggle room
It can't be mere coincidence that, three months since their new cars were born a dud, neither McLaren nor Williams have yet managed to apply any sort of fix to the MP4-28 and FW35 respectively. If it was just one team locked into a cycle of poor performance then the first answer to their shortcomings would most likely be found in the team mirror. But when two different outfits, both of whom won races last year, continue to go from bad to worse then the regretful conclusion has to be that they picked a particularly bad year for regression. Static regulations, it is safe to suggest. have left them with no room for escape. Once born a dud, a car stays a dud. Williams and McLaren have picked the worst year possible to try to play catch-up. Not that McLaren are giving up yet. Having been unable to run the new front-wing which arrived at the Circuit de Catalunya on Saturday morning but too late to pass the FIA's tolerance test, the team are guaranteed to have something new in Monaco with which to try and arrest their ongoing decline into the mire of the midfield. But we're already fast-approaching what's likely to be a cut-off point for when a decision must be taken on whether give up on a bad job and focus afresh for the revolution of 2014. Monte Carlo or bust for the MP4-28? Maybe. PG