The race is on, and despite Lewis Hamilton and Mercedes winning the first race of the season,

Red Bull has had the edge on performance based on the evidence so far. But how confident can we be

that this is how things will continue? And just how big a limitation is the low-rate concept for

Mercedes and Aston Martin. I'm Edstraw and joining me to answer those questions and more

are Gary Anderson and Mark Hughes. Well, hello Gary. I guess you're probably relieved to be

enjoying your F-1 retirement right now rather than scrambling around to learn the lessons from

the first weekend.

I'm sure you had quite a few stressful moments from your past life at this sort of time of year.

Yeah, you're right there, and I'm definitely enjoying it more than being there and taking all that pressure.

You know, it's one of those sort of situations.

You never know where you are until the first race, really.

I think seeing Mercedes come out on top, I think they know they shouldn't have really. But they did. And that gets them the 25 points, which is what it's all about. You know, points make prizes. So as long as you can grab them on a weekend when maybe you should only have had maybe 18 or 15, then the end of the day you've done

a better job than the rest. No matter what about the speed of the car. So the season has

suddenly become hopefully 22 more races. And at the minute, Mercedes are leading it. But Red Bull,

definitely have a faster car at this point in time. I was impressed that Mercedes

himself did, you know, recover from a bad situation from testing. I mean, they were openly admitting

that they were in trouble. I think they still are admitting it. But I think it'll change from

circuit to circuit. You know, the right height thing becomes a slightly different thing, or this

rake thing becomes a slightly different thing from circuit to circuit circuit so i don't think anybody could sit here and say

oh yeah that it's got the same story the whole year long it's not like that it really isn't like that

so i think uh we need to see three or four races to try and get a little bit of a trend through it

from different circuits and see a how Mercedes can respond

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