Lewis Hamilton may face further issues in trying to catch Red Bull and Ferrari very soon

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Mercedes will be hoping to catch Red Bull and Ferrari in the very near future, but they may have to be even more careful of the teams racing just behind them, judging from comments made by McLaren team boss Andreas Seidl. It’s been a frustrating start to the season for both George Russell and Lewis Hamilton, with the latter in unfamiliar territory of not being able to challenge for race wins.

Hamilton secured a fortunate podium in Bahrain with both Red Bull cars retiring from the race. And a similar scenario played into the hands of Russell last time out at the Australian Grand Prix.

Mercedes do sit ahead of Red Bull in the Constructors’ Championship, but that’s largely due to reliability issues for the Milton Keynes-based team. But the Silver Arrows have been off the pace and unable to compete with Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc on track.

Hamilton is already 43 points behind Leclerc and that gap is almost certain to increase after next week’s Emilia Romagna Grand Prix. Perhaps more urgent for Mercedes is keeping those teams battling in behind them where they are.

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AlphaTauri, Alpine and Haas have all enjoyed strong performances this season while McLaren were much better last time out in Australia. McLaren had been tipped to be challenging at the front after pre-season testing in Bahrain, but they’ve not been able to figure out the issues on their MCL36.

But Seidl insists there is now a “clear plan” on how McLaren can resolve their problems, which could spell bad news for Hamilton and Mercedes.

“It was obviously important after realising that we are lacking performance, to analyse and do the studies to work out how we can improve performance as quickly as possible,” Seidl told The Race.

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“I’m very happy saying that we have a clear plan in place now of what we need to do with the car in terms of making steps in terms of performance. This will take a bit of time. So we need to be patient despite all the ambition. But the most important thing is we have a clear plan that we execute now.

“In terms of when this is happening exactly, I don’t want to go too much into detail. There are different parameters you have to manage when you do that, there’s the cost cap, which you need to consider, there is the limited windtunnel time also that you have nowadays, which you need to consider.

“That’s why you need to package it a bit as well as what you’re doing.”

Lando Norris and Daniel Ricciardo finished just behind the two Mercedes drivers in Australia last weekend.

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