Ferrari’s Formula 1 car has never been as it looked in 2022, with the Scuderia’s surprising start to the season creating a false impression of the team’s overall potential.
That’s the view of respected technical analyst Craig Scarborough, who believes Red Bull’s stuttering start to the year has flattered the Ferrari F1-75.
Ferrari gave the impression of being the heavy favourite to win the 2022 name after Charles Leclerc won two of the first 3 races to identify a 46-point lead over Max Verstappen, who retired in Bahrain and Australia.
Although Leclerc took the maximum pole position of any driving force in 2022, Ferrari added just two more wins for the rest of the year, and Verstappen eventually won 15 races, breaking the record for maximum wins through a driving force in a single season. Safe for his consecutive championship moment.
Ferrari’s failure to capitalise on its good start led to the resignation of team principal Mattia Binotto earlier this week.
Appearing on F1 journalist Peter Windsor’s Twitch channel, Sautomobileborough claimed that Red Bull’s difficulties in optimising its package at the start of the season made Ferrari’s car much more competitive than it was.
He said: “Ferrari won the winter championship, as they do so often, and we thought: ‘Are they really good?’And they gave us the first races and Red Bull had problems, everyone had worse problems, and Ferrari seemed to perceive that.
“They had this impressive, very well rated car that held Verstappen in the races until reliability came along: things were going well and suddenly we thought it was finally Ferrari’s year.
“I think it was a little flattering at the time. Red Bull was overweight, suffering with the tyres, it was difficult to drive the car in the early stages and they had reliability issues. “
“Ferrari evolved a car quite the opposite of Mercedes in many tactics: a very low-drag car with those big pontoons that treated the airflow at the rear of the car and it was the crest of the pontoons, not the gap, that was vital. “thing.
“They had a different package, but internally the car was very conventional, which assures you they didn’t go too far with a concept to make it work. Mercedes had to replace the shape of its car for its package to work.
“But the challenge was that I just didn’t have enough support. They controlled for the tyres to work in qualifying, how difficult it was to perceive it with the downforce they had, but in the race it was shown that the degradation of their tyres was much worse.
“The more they tried to put the wing on the car to get downforce, the slower they became and that drag they sought to remove from the car naturally triumphed through [the extra wing].
“I think Ferrari was flattered to lie very early in the season. I don’t think this car has ever been as smart as we thought and during the time Red Bull put their car together, it was literally qualifying when this Ferrari shined. “
Given that Ferrari did not win a race after the summer break, the implementation of the technical directive against Marseille at the Belgian Grand Prix was cited as one of the main reasons why the team left Mercedes in the festival order as the season drew to a close. .
However, with the technical directive announced five rounds earlier in Canada, Scarborough believes the groups have had enough time to prepare for the rule change.
He added: “I couldn’t see a real correlation between the two because this technical directive came out so late after announcing that everyone had developed their car in preparation. “
“Unlike Ferrari having stopped getting into their car and protecting their power units, Mercedes was taking full advantage of the underlying functionality they had in this car, as limited as the matrix and tyre control in the race and, as a result, they have to be so close to the end of the season.
“I don’t think the technical directive harms Mercedes and I don’t think it literally hurts Ferrari. I think Ferrari had really been in a downward corner almost since the first races, they had a downward trend the year as Mercedes went. “The other way.
“They had to cross paths at some point. “
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