Formula One: Red Bull need to reboot their season in Shanghai as Ferrari and Mercedes go head to head again

Those of you who have been to Shanghai to watch the Chinese Grand Prix will have experienced an F1 trip full of contradictions.

I still remember getting to the inaugural 2004 Chinese Grand Prix – I tagged along with some North London Chinese restaurant owners to keep immigration paperwork a bit simpler – and feeling completely bemused as I tried to get my simple Scottish head around the experience.

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I wouldn’t mark the Chinese Grand Prix down as one of my favourite races but a trip here is always memorable – at least partly because of those contradictions I mentioned.

An F1 circuit where drivers weigh half a tonne

Here’s the first of these contradictions. Slowing down for Turn 14, the hairpin, cars will plummet through their gear ratios from eighth to second, as they drop from around 200mph to about 40mph.

That is brutal braking – drivers will be subject to about 7g of deceleration, meaning an average driver will be pressing against his harness with a force of around 500kg, every lap for 56 laps, not to mention pulling up to 5g laterally in the most testing corners.

In total, there are eight braking zones at the Shanghai International Circuit and you’d think the tortured brakes would be ablaze after a couple of laps.

But no. The circuit’s long straights may make for high speeds but they also give the brakes time to cool, and so brake wear isn’t such an issue.

It’s a bit different for tyres though.

Cars will run with only moderate aero downforce, to get those straight-line speeds up. But that means there’s less downforce to help them through the corners, and Shanghai’s corners are challenging.

There are two 270-degree corners and any lack of precision – any slidey understeer – will destroy lap times.

The first of these, Turn 1, is one of F1’s better corners, and watch out for action there if anyone decides to dive down the inside – it’s a place you can easily understeer into trouble.

From a race perspective, the Mercedes cars are notoriously unforgiving of their tyres and, if they get stuck behind a Ferrari or even a Red Bull, they’ll run the risk of cooking their rubber as they battle the turbulence from the car in front.

Pirelli have brought a slightly left-field selection of tyres for this race – mediums, softs and then ultrasofts, skipping the supersofts. That choice creates both challenges and opportunities for the strategists and, as we saw in Bahrain, strategy can be everything at the front of the field in particular.

A circuit of highs and lows

Despite being only 14 years old, the circuit is a bit ropey round the edges. When it rains, some of the grandstands can look like venues for downhill water-skiing. But look at the bigger picture and it’s still an impressive beast.

Track designers Hermann Tilke and Peter Wahl put together a circuit that encourages a bit of overtaking, and spectators near the top of the main stand in particular get to see a fair amount of action.

The food … ah, the food, that’s another contradiction. Anyone going to this grand prix and expecting fine Chinese nosh is going to be sorely disappointed.

I’d eat at the stalls outside the circuit because the stuff inside is generally a let-down.

One of my memories from 2004 is sadly picking through pineapple fried rice – that was the entire menu – wishing for nothing more posh than a Silverstone bacon butty. My travelling companions, the London Chinese restaurant owners, were suitably under-impressed.

And China doesn’t have nearly the same level of entertainment and endless merch opportunities that F1 fans in other parts of the world have got used to. Yes, that will save you a few quid but the atmosphere isn’t the same.

Who’s got the power?

The weather isn’t that reliable in Shanghai, so expect some damp to add an extra layer of intrigue at some point over the F1 weekend.

Those long straights will give us a chance to watch Ferrari power go head-to-head with Mercedes power, and seeing who has the upper hand – aerodynamic choices notwithstanding – could be fascinating, given the various claims about who actually has the advantage.

Mercedes have powered eight of the last ten F1 winners here and you’ve got to go back to 2013 to find a non-Mercedes victory – Alonso in a Ferrari.

All the teams have something to prove. Mercedes have had a poor start to the year, and both the Merc strategists and the drivers could do with putting a solid weekend together.

At Ferrari, it looks pretty fine on paper – two wins from two races for Sebastian Vettel. But that, of course, doesn’t tell the whole story, and Ferrari have ridden their luck in both previous grands prix this season.

And they have to show they’ve sorted their pit work out as well. Last weekend they picked up a €5,000 fine for an unsafe release on Friday, followed by a €50,000 fine for the shambles that left mechanic Francesco Cigarini with a shattered left leg, when Kimi Raikkonen’s pitstop went appallingly wrong.

Red Bull really need to reboot their season this weekend. A lacklustre Aussie race was followed by last weekend’s double retirement, and all eyes will be on Max Verstappen to see if he can get through Saturday and Sunday without being, as Lewis Hamilton described him, a d***.

The combination of lower downforce and stressed tyres means that Verstappen has even less room for error if he goes barnstorming into passing manoeuvres – a fact that his Red Bull bosses will not have allowed him to overlook.

Elsewhere, it will be all about starting to see what the 2018 pecking order is. Can McLaren finish both cars in the points again? They’ve shaken up their management structure, and commercial chief Zak Brown now officially runs the F1 operation – what’s going to change? (Hint: at some point, it’s likely to involve another management retuning)

Is that Honda in the back of the Toro Rosso good enough to help Pierre Gasly to another famous result – and another step towards a promotion to Red Bull at some point?

Gasly’s remarkable fourth in Bahrain was down to some great driving, some great aero and floor updates to the Toro Rosso and a genuinely surprising spurt of pace and reliability from the long-suffering bods at Honda.

It was, of course, also down to three top-tier cars retiring and Bahrain suiting the Toro Rosso down to the ground. Those two long straights at Shanghai aren’t likely to flatter the Honda (or Renault) engines, which have good driveability but lack top-end grunt – we’re in for another corking battle between the likes of Renault, Haas, Toro Rosso and McLaren.

Will.i.am.slow

Down at the back of the grid, only one team has no points from the opening races. Step forward Williams, sparing Force India and Sauber’s blushes by being this year’s early contenders for F1 Basket Case of the Season.

Williams seem to take a beating every day about their driver line-up – two very ordinary first-team drivers and a hugely respected test driver who doesn’t have two fully-functioning arms – but that alone can’t explain them corkscrewing to the bottom of the Constructors’ Championship … especially as they have the might of Mercedes power driving those rear wheels.

Their relative success in the 2014 and 15 seasons (third in the Constructors’ championship) was at least partly due to the fact the Merc engine was beefy and the Williams was designed to go fast in a straight line.

Merc reliability has helped them pick up points in the last two, disappointing (fifth-place), seasons. And, to be fair, the other Mercedes customer team, Force India, have only a solitary point to their name this season.

Even if Williams could pull off that old trick of going fast enough on Shanghai’s long straights to stay ahead in the corners, it’s hard to see them challenging for points this weekend.

With all the other contradictions around this race, it would be nice if the weakest team of the year so far managed to score a point or two.