Mercedes needs to find a second, Brawn admits

Ross Brawn says that Mercedes has to find a second in the upgrades that it’s bringing to the next test in Barcelona and the first race in Melbourne.

Brawn insists that the team always intended to save its major upgrades for later in the winter, but conceded he didn’t know whether the strategy would work,

“It is very hard to judge because of different fuel weights,” Brawn said in a live interview on BBC Five Live. “Tyres are going to be very important, and most sensible teams have been running with high fuel loads, because that’s where you get the highest degradation, that’s when you stress the tyres the most, and that’s where you want to find a good solution. So it is difficult to judge.

“We said when we started that we had some things to learn on KERS and tyres and we were going to start with a fairly plain car, and you’ll see in Barcelona something quite different. We’re as quietly confident as we can be. We think our strategy is correct, approaching it the way we have, and we’ll all know when we get to the first race.

“It’s been pretty difficult to judge where everyone is. At the last test at Barcelona we included had a go at running low fuel and the supersoft tyres, and we were the second quickest car, but I don’t think that’s where we are overall.”

Pressed on where he thought the team was, Brawn said: “I think we’re about a second off where we want to be, and where we want to be is mixing it at the front. So we’ve got to find a second in the upgrade, which we think we can do, but you never know what other people are going to do. Everybody’s going to have new bits at Barcelona. If somebody does come through with a radical innovation that none of the other teams have thought about, it can change things.

“But we set out our plan, and we’ll know when we get to Melbourne whether the plan was right.”