Ten days before the start of winter testing in Jerez, Niki Lauda, the non-executive director of Mercedes, reviewed the competition for Autosport<\/i>. The Austrian believes that the first threat to the world champion team will be Red Bull Racing, their runner-up last season: [Red Bull] will be there, but the question is how much they will have improved.<\/p>\n
On the contrary, the triple world champion doesn’t see Ferrari and McLaren-Honda as too serious threats: \u00ab There has been too little information about Ferrari at the moment, and McLaren-Honda will have to go through a difficult season. \u00bb He has not, however, commented on Williams.<\/p>\n
Despite the thaw in engine development, supposed to reduce the gap between the Mercedes engine and its competitors, Niki Lauda is not worried about his team: \u00ab Mercedes AMG is of course in an excellent position; but we want to improve everywhere, as others do. I would tell you that you can only judge the quality of the field after the first three races. \u00bb<\/p>\n
The Austrian discussed other topics, notably commenting on the relevance of winter testing in the cold Spanish locations of Jerez and Barcelona, unlike last season when the F1 world also went to Bahrain: \u00ab What I don’t understand is that we have three tests in Spain again and none in the Persian Gulf, which would have been a much better preparation for the heat of Melbourne \u00bb. Let’s remember that F1 skipped Bahrain this February to cut costs.<\/p>\n
To conclude his interview, Niki Lauda revisited the current negotiations between Mercedes and Lewis Hamilton, whose new contract has still not been signed. According to him, there is nothing alarming: \u00ab [Hamilton] was on vacation and the team is in the midst of preparing the cars for the season. Both parties have stated that they want to continue together. Toto [Wolff] is handling it and will finalize the deal. \u00bb<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Largely dominant last season, Mercedes must not rest on its laurels according to Niki Lauda. The non-executive director of the team is particularly concerned about a comeback from Red Bull in 2015.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":38696,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,1749],"tags":[813,964,1334],"class_list":["post-13878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-f1","category-news","tag-lauda","tag-mercedes-amg-f1","tag-red-bull"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n