Three months after the tumultuous climax of the 2021 championship, a new one begins with the shadows of that day in Abu Dhabi still hanging over the sport.
After losing an eighth drivers’ world title in controversial and painful circumstances, Lewis Hamilton and his Mercedes team are trying to move on, at least in public.
The man who beat him, Max Verstappen, is likely to start the new season as favourite, but his Red Bull team principal Christian Horner continues to attack and level various accusations at Mercedes. That they “bullied” the sport’s governing body into making changes; they mounted a campaign to discredit Verstappen’s title, and so.
Meanwhile, the ramifications of a day in which the sport’s referee made up the rules on the fly continue to resonate. The FIA, acknowledging that mistakes were made at Yas Marina, have made changes.
A report on the day’s events is expected to be published this weekend. But race director Michael Masi has already been moved to a different role, his freestyle with the rules under extreme pressure at Yas Marina having made his position untenable.
Instead, two people will alternate in a role that is not intended to be as prominent. A more robust structure has been established around it. And a face from the past has been brought back to try to add a bit of seriousness and experience.
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The new race directors will be advised by Herbie Blash, F1 veteran and longtime associate of the late FIA F1 director Charlie Whiting, whose death on the eve of the 2019 season saw Masi rise to the role he has now lost.
As if that wasn’t enough, the sport’s rulebook has been ripped apart and rewritten from scratch. An entirely new set of technical regulations have been introduced in the hope of producing cars that are more alike in terms of performance and can also compete more effectively.
The cars
The cars that will be seen on track during the 22 or 23 races between now and mid-November are the product of four years of research by F1 and the FIA, and two years of development work by the teams.
After extensive analysis by a team under the direction of F1 managing director Ross Brawn, the aerodynamics of the cars were fundamentally revised, in a bid to ensure drivers can follow each other more closely. And the rules have been made deliberately prescriptive to try to reduce the performance gap between the front and back of the field.
The fear was that this would create a field of doubles. But, in fact, there is more visual variation between the 10 cars than for any considerable time, much to the relief of the teams themselves and sports fans alike.
The three teams expected to lead the way at the start of the season – Red Bull, Ferrari and Mercedes – have all taken strikingly different approaches to solving the same set of problems.
Mercedes has stripped down the bodywork of its car to such an extent that its sidepods are hardly there. Red Bull has created dramatic cutouts below theirs. And Ferrari’s are almost bulbous, but with graceful scalloped curves clipped to the top. Even the cars’ noses are different: Ferrari’s narrow, needle-shaped ones versus the more conventional, boxy ones of Mercedes and Red Bull.
Who seems to be the fastest?
The big three teams finished pre-season testing fastest, with lap times within a few tenths of a second of each other. But Red Bull looked stronger, and not just because Verstappen set the fastest time.
Ferrari showed the most consistent performance, while Mercedes looked defensive. Promising early in testing, McLaren ran into reliability issues later that need to be ironed out before the car hits the track this weekend.
Hamilton has said that “He doesn’t think we’re going to compete for victories” at the beginning of the season. Verstappen is treating that claim with skepticism. He harkened back to previous years in which a difficult pre-season for Mercedes was followed by victory in the first race, when he said of the world champion’s attempts to downplay expectations: “It’s always like that.”
However, on the track, the Mercedes seemed to be in trouble. It was clearly a tough one for his drivers, Hamilton and highly-rated new recruit George Russell. And Alpha Tauri’s Pierre Gasly, who spent a couple of laps tailing Hamilton on the final day of testing, backed up his claims.
“I could see that Lewis was fighting and I think they have work to do to be fighting at the top,” the Frenchman said. “But it’s just a test.”
Bouncing cars and ‘porpoises’
Mercedes was suffering greatly from a phenomenon that had not been seen in F1 for 40 years: the ‘porpoise’.
This is a type of high-frequency bounce caused by an aerodynamic disruption that these cars are vulnerable to following rule changes.
It’s a word from the past: it was commonplace in the late 1970s and 1980s, when “ground effect” aerodynamics were last allowed to be reintroduced with these cars. But hardly anyone in an engineering role in F1 now was back then, and his occurrence took every team by surprise.
One man who was around in the early 1980s was Red Bull technical director Adrian Newey, who was just beginning his career as the last era of ground effect drew to a close.
Could it be a coincidence that Red Bull seems to be above the phenomenon? They didn’t seem to experience it at all once their final update was released on the last day of testing.
Despite Verstappen’s skepticism, GPS speed records to which all teams have access back up Mercedes’ claims. Their main loss of time was in the corners, belying Ferrari’s suggestion that their apparent lack of pace was due to using their engine in a lower power mode.
The Ferrari was especially good in the slow corners, struggling in the faster corners, and not so good on the straights. The Red Bull seemed to be strong everywhere.
Hence Verstappen’s status as favourite. The Dutchman is a phenomenon, a force of nature. His 2020 season was outstanding, even if his super-aggressive racing tactics are not to everyone’s liking, and he is a talent worthy of the title of world champion, regardless of one’s opinions on what happened in Abu Dhabi. .
If Red Bull is as good as it looks, Verstappen will hold back for a bit. But it should be noted that, after such a big regulation change, development rates will be high, and the fate of the championship will likely depend on who can add the most pace to their car during the season, while staying within budget. limit, reduced this year by $5 million to $140 million.
Will it be the closest race?
It’s an old cliché in F1, but no less true for that, that a true picture of the shape of the season will only begin to form after a few races.
Brawn is confident that the changes you have monitored will work. Regardless, for now, the impression that the length of the field appears to be shrinking, and some positive signs about the racing ability of the cars, should be treated with caution.
Several drivers said during testing that it seemed easier to follow them more closely, as the amount of grip they lost seemed to reduce.
But some added that the ‘towing’ effect – a speed gain created when close to a car due to the hole in the air it creates – had been reduced, saying one could cancel out the other.
Then there is the issue of tires. Since Pirelli entered F1 as sole supplier in 2011, tires have been prone to overheating. This has meant that drivers have had to drive within themselves most of the time to keep the rubber within the required temperature threshold.
This had two related effects: drivers were generally well under the limit of the cars, and racing was difficult because if a driver pushed to try to overtake, the tires quickly overheated.
Among this year’s rule changes was the introduction of larger wheels and lower profile tyres, and Pirelli was asked to change the design of the tires to make them more robust, less sensitive to overheating and more durable, so that drivers could approach the limit all the time. time, and run harder. After all, there’s not much point in creating more “runable” cars if the tires turn to licorice when you’re trying to follow another car.
There are mixed messages about whether this has been successful. At a press conference this winter, Aston Martin’s Lance Stroll said the tires were no different in their characteristics, only for Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz to say he was more optimistic that Pirelli had succeeded to some degree.
In Bahrain last week, the two most successful active drivers in the sport gave their opinion. Four-time champion Sebastian Vettel noted that the heavier cars meant “the challenge for Pirelli has increased”, adding: “We have to wait and see, see how it feels, see if we can race closer and harder. , or if we start to slide.” .”
Hamilton, meanwhile, was scathing. “The tires are worse this year,” he said. “Following behind another car looks a bit better, which is hopefully the right direction. Hopefully maybe we can get better tires at some point, or maybe they’ll work better in places that aren’t as hot.”
What else has changed?
F1 has done a remarkable job in the last two years to stage two full seasons in the midst of the pandemic. Now that the threat of Covid-19 seems to be receding, he has ambitions to stage his longest season with 23 races, in one month less than the 22 events of 2021.
The season ends in mid-November instead of mid-December so as not to coincide with the FIFA World Cup.
One race has already fallen by the wayside, the Russian Grand Prix canceled for the foreseeable future as a result of the Ukraine invasion, but F1 intends to replace it. And to celebrate so many races in such a short time, changes have been made to the structure of the weekends.
The idea is to reduce F1 weekends from four days to three, to lessen the load on the teams. The first casualty is media day on Thursday; now, press conferences are Friday morning before practices start later. It’s going to be a long day for everyone on Friday before the actual competition begins on Saturday.
Attempts to double the number of ‘sprint’ events to six failed followed by money, so there will be three of those again.
But the big test is the rules. Will this new era really be better and brighter than ever, will the competition be tighter across the field?
After the last era ended with one of the best seasons ever, he has a lot to live up to.
Bahrain on Sunday will begin to provide the answers as to whether this grand experiment will succeed.
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