Bla, bla, bla, "Red Bull is the DOWNFORCE MACHINE, always gains in the corners, struggles on the straights beacause of the extra drag and - to some extent - Honda power, Mercedes something, something, new floor regs, something, lower downforce ceiling, something, low drag, something, that Mercedes power tho..." (not the first article like this)...
This honestly makes a mockery out of the amazingly nuanced technological battle between the two top teams that are competing for the titles this year, and the tech-side of F1 in general, all in order to create an oversimplified, easily digestable, almost comic book-esque narrative for the casual fan where both "superheroes", or both "villain" and "hero" have their very distinct strenghts and weaknesses...
... How come Lewis was faster than anyone in the corners of Qatar, including Verstappen with the Monaco-spec rear wing mounted to his Red Bull (a track they definitively ruled to be RB-territory prior to the race weekend, based on the same notions expressed in this article), how could Bottas have the measure on the rainmaster Verstappen in changeable conditions in Turkey?
Raw aero downforce is still BY FAR the most significant performance-diffrentiator in F1, I find the idea that Red Bull could have a serious advantage in this area and still be decisively beatable for the Mercs on their days ridiculous, the only performance pattern we could clearly see forming this season is that the W12 is "more on it's nose" compared to it's competitor, meaning that it tends to perform better in front-limited bends, meanwhile rear-limited sections favour the RB16B, we can often observe this phenomena on the same single track even (in Jeddah for example, all those short, tight corners were much better for the Red Bull, however, I'm not sure if VER actually took the purple mini sector on his final Q3 attempt, but the Merc was definitely better in the long, banked T13 up to that point, the very slow first chicane and last corner also favoured the Silver-emblemed car all weekend, as they were outliers of the typical speed range), but EVEN THAT is a sweeping generalization, reality - as always in F1 - is way more nuanced, and I'm sure you could find plenty of exceptions to this "rule" if you looked hard enough...
Anyways, as to the topic of the Abu Dhabi race and track layout changes, the removal of the chicane and widening of corners - amongst making the circuit more drag-sensitive, obviously - actually eases stress on the rear axle and puts more duty on the front, I think that's the main upside for Mercedes.
