FORMULA 1
BALANCING ACT NEW-FOR-2022 RULES MAKE FOR DIFFICULT DECISIONS IN FORMULA 1 STORY BY JEFF PAPPONE I PHOTOS COURTESY OF FORMULA 1 AND FERRARI
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s Formula 1 teams fight on track for wins, points, and ultimately two world championships, a behind the scenes balancing act continues to play a key role in deciding this year’s outcome and possibly next year’s, too. With the 2022 rules bringing wholesale changes to the cars, Formula 1 teams need to find the best mix of staying competitive this year, keeping one eye on the next, and choosing the right moment to shift all their focus to their new design. No matter what they do, almost every choice becomes a pay me now or pay me later quandary. “Clearly, you’re going to compromise something by going one route or the other, so I think you just have to be pragmatic,” said McLaren Racing’s technical director James Key. “What we can see is the 2022 car is such a different thing and there’s so much work to understand fully what these cars are going to be like that naturally there has to be an ongoing project in the background there somewhere, so it’s never a case of one or the other.” For some, the pragmatic choice is an easy one. Even before this season started, Haas F1 Team boss Günther Steiner said his outfit wouldn’t “do anything with the 2021 car” and “go full throttle on” 2022. That may sound like an easy decision for a team battling not to be last this year, but it still has consequences. Williams Racing driver, and Canadian, Nicholas Latifi pointed out that even gaining one spot in the final standings means a difference of millions of dollars in prize money that could ease other pressures on the team in 2022. “It’s definitely a question that every team is weighing and trying to decide when is the right moment to really just abandon ship on development regardless of the position of the car?” said the Canadian. “It’s a very tricky one to get right. As a driver, it’s clear that you want developments coming every race because it makes you go 64 Inside Track Motorsport News
quicker but, in the global picture of the team, you must keep an eye on next year, too.” Further up the grid, those decisions get more intricate. With Lewis Hamilton locking horns with Red Bull Racing’s Max Verstappen on every weekend, the Mercedes AMG F1 Team knows that a move to forgo more speed this year could come at the cost of world championship glory. “You could spend all night staring at the ceiling over that instead of sleeping, but you can comfort yourself by knowing that at least the people you’re competing with have got the same dilemma,” said Mercedes chief technical officer James Allison.
“Over the years, teams that face the same sort of dilemma make similar judgments. They tend to do a little bit more on the current car than they ought to, just because the bird in the hand feels a little more valuable than the one in the bush, but no one – unless they’re pretty stupid – ignores what’s coming down the tracks.” If that already didn’t create enough complexity, regulation changes for 2021 added even more to the mix by stripping relatively more performance from cars with a low rear ride height like the Mercedes than high-rake style entries such as the Red Bull. While Mercedes’ work in the first few weeks of the season moved
