Why F1’s battle for the scraps is about more than pride

Red Bull’s performance this season has been magnificent, even allowing for the blip in Singapore a week before the team secured the constructors’ championship in Japan.

With six rounds still remaining, it’s a new record — a stat that should not be downplayed simply because there are more races per season now. Three of those six events feature sprints that combine to offer more than another race’s worth of points.

But that championship success was a foregone conclusion as early as the fourth race of the season as Red Bull showed itself to be strong on every type of venue. That storyline has been shut down, but there are two hugely entertaining fights — for different reasons — just behind them.

Neither of the two teams fighting for second place in the constructors’ standings this season will have had that target in mind when they entered the year. Mercedes and Ferrari both harbored hopes of putting up a challenge to Red Bull and entering the frame for top honors.

Last season played out in a similar season way, with the two were fighting for second overall right up until the final round.

It was a different dynamic in 2022, though. Ferrari had started the season with arguably the quickest car, and certainly a race-winning one that secured a one-two in Bahrain. The Scuderia was seen as a championship contender early on. Mercedes, meanwhile, was in real trouble with the new regulations and took a long time to become competitive, but there was a one-two of its own when George Russell took his first win in Brazil.

The impression was Ferrari had performed poorly as it slipped away from Red Bull and only just managed to hang onto second place, while Mercedes showed encouraging development to get into that fight.

This year it’s been much more balanced, but if anything the roles are slightly reversed. Although Ferrari was quick in Bahrain, Mercedes appeared the more consistent of the two, regularly being third quickest while others fluctuated around it.

That the gap had opened up to as much as 56 points over Ferrari by the summer break suggested P2 would be a formality, but consistency now belongs to the Scuderia, which has delivered a very solid run from Monza onwards. Across very different types of circuit, that bodes well for it to be a tussle right to Abu Dhabi.

Should you care? Well, Mercedes does, not only because of pride and the spirit of competition, but because of the way learning from these kinds of pressure situations can set a team up for the ultimate prize in the future.

“We definitely want to beat them, and they’ll want to beat us,” Andrew Shovlin said of Ferrari. “Second place is not a world championship, and if we win it we aren’t going to be as crazy as Red Bull are right now, but it is important for us and everyone at the factory wants to achieve that.

“It’s also actually quite good practice, because we haven’t been fighting for a championship for a couple of years, and in our sense…