Lewis Hamilton branded ‘beatable’ by ‘p***ed off’ Red Bull engineer Pierre Wache

F1: Lewis Hamilton goes for a seaside run

Red Bull’s chief engineer Pierre Wache is furious that his team were not able to end Mercedes’ F1 dominance last season. Lewis Hamilton secured his seventh world title while helping the Silver Arrows achieve the double for a seventh year in a row.

Red Bull’s Max Verstappen has been Hamilton’s closest challenger over recent years but has never looked like winning the long battle.

The Dutchman finished third in the standings in 2020, 133 points behind Hamilton and nine away from Valtteri Bottas.

Ahead of last season, Red Bull were confident that they could take the fight to the Silver Arrows but they only managed to win two races.

Wache feels his team only got to grips with their car late in the year and is gutted that the opportunity to fight for the title passed them by.

“We missed an opportunity because I think they [Mercedes] were beatable,” Wache told Motorsport Magazine.

“If we’d found what we find now on the car, we’d beat them. I’m p***ed off with that and I think we’re all on the same page.

“They did do a good job, to be fair, no DNF etc. But they are not everywhere perfect and I think we can find more performance than them, even with the engines as they were. They are beatable.”

Meanwhile, Mercedes technical director James Allison agrees that his team did not make too many changes to improve their W11 from previous editions.

“Moving away from your current position on anything that works is fraught with peril,” he said.

“It’s a frightening thing to do, because when you change from your current concept to go off in a different direction, you are almost certainly going to spend quite a long time worse – slower than your current concept because you’ve put a lot of effort into your current concept and nearly all the movements away from there are going to initially be worse.

“And only after a certain amount of consistent investment in that new position are you going to start to get the benefit back from it.

“And it’s very hard to be very brave in jumping to a new configuration because you fear that you’re just going to never catch even if you’re eventually on a better concept, you’re going to be behind by the amount of time that you’ve spent learning how to use that new concept.

“So that tends to make teams stick year after year after year with what they’ve got.”

Verstappen is expected to be Hamilton’s closest challenger again this year and he will be boosted by new team-mate Sergio Perez.

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