FORMULA 1 DUEL FALLS FLAT

Red Bull Racing Dominates As Ferrari Fizzles

Story by Jeff Pappone

While the 2022 technical regulations promised to bring nonstop, wheel-to-wheel racing, the first Formula 1 season under the new rules turned out to be a case of ‘not exactly as advertised.’

Although the early going did deliver some good action at the front, the 2022 season soon devolved into the ‘Red Bull Racing Show’ with its driver Max Verstappen clinching a second consecutive world championship with four grands prix to go.

“It’s been a pretty special year and I think it’s something you really have to remind yourself of because these kinds of years you don’t have very often,” Verstappen said after winning the title in Japan. “But it’s also very important to look back at what the whole team has achieved. That’s why I think you really must enjoy the moment and really appreciate the whole team around you. We’re all travelling a lot, and everyone is working very hard towards the same goal. I’m pretty sure that it will be very hard to try and replicate a season like this.”

In addition to scoring a record 15 wins, along with seven poles and 17 podiums in 22 races, the Dutchman delivered the second widest gap ever between first and second in the drivers’ championship, falling just nine points shy of four-time champion Sebastian Vettel’s 2013 margin of 155. Verstappen’s teammate Sergio Pérez added two wins and one pole to help Red Bull win the constructors’ title.

Although Verstappen netted a record number of victories, he did it in 23 races for a winning percentage of 68 percent, just off the 72 percent posted by previous record holder Michael Schumacher, who won 13 of 18 grands prix in 2003.

But the dominance wasn’t without controversy after the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) revealed Red Bull violated the new cost cap rules, somewhat tainting a stellar performance. And team boss Christian Horner didn’t help his team’s reputation much with his over-the-top reaction after rumours of a cost cap breach surfaced in early October in Singapore.

“I would be intrigued to know where their source of information for these fictitious claims have come from. They are hugely defamatory, and we take umbrage to them,” Horner said. “Unless there is a clear withdrawal of those statements, we will be taking it incredibly seriously and looking at what the options available to us are, because it is absolutely unacceptable to be making comments of the type that were made.”

In the end, the only absolutely unacceptable thing turned out to be Red Bull’s accounting, which brought red faces all around when the governing body revealed it had overspent by about $3 million. The team paid fine of $9.4 million, but the bigger price may be the penalty of a ten percent reduction in wind tunnel or computational fluid dynamics time for its 2023 car design.

Things got worse when some team cohesion cracks began to show late in the season after Verstappen refused to let Pérez re-pass him on the final lap of the penultimate Brazilian Grand Prix despite the team asking several times. Pérez pulled aside earlier in the race to allow his teammate to try to gain more positions with the understanding that he would get the place back if Verstappen’s progress stalled. After he failed move up, Verstappen reneged on the deal and proceeded to admonish his team on the radio for asking him to honour it.

“I told you already last time you guys, don’t ask that again to me. Okay? Are we clear about that? I gave my reasons and I stand by it,” Verstappen said on the radio after being asked what happened.

When the team apologized to Pérez seconds later, he retorted: “Yeah. It shows who he really is.”

At the time, Pérez needed every point possible in his battle to beat Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc to second in the driver standings and secure Red Bull’s first ever one-two in points. When the dust settled, Pérez ended the year third overall, three points shy of second.

On top of that, Horner and Verstappen threw their toys out of the baby carriage a week earlier when they boycotted British Formula 1 broadcaster Sky during the Mexico Grand Prix. The move was in protest of commentator Ted Kravitz’s assertion during the previous Formula 1 weekend that Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton was “robbed” of title No. 8 in the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.

Many might recall that Verstappen’s first championship came after former race director Michael Masi ignored the safety car regulations in the 2021 title decider, a move that many felt unfairly disadvantaged Hamilton and essentially gifted the crown to the Red Bull driver.

After battling tooth-and-nail to the wire in 2021, Hamilton and Verstappen rarely raced in closely a year later. In fact, the Mercedes driver experienced his first Formula 1 season without a win and spent most of it playing catch-up to his new teammate George Russell, who took the Sliver Arrow’s only win in Brazil.

The only real sparks between Hamilton and Verstappen came when the pair made contact early in that same Brazilian Grand Prix. The Turn 2 incident not only took Hamilton out of contention but also damaged Verstappen’s car enough to help set up the final lap drama with Pérez.

With Mercedes and several other teams struggling with “porpoising” where the cars bounce violently in high-speed sectors due to the aerodynamics repeatedly causing a rapid stall-release cycle under it, the early title favourite looked to be Ferrari’s Leclerc. He won two of the first three races and led the points for the first five races before the Italian team stumbled though multiple problems as the season wore on which ultimately saw team boss Mattia Binotto leave Maranello after the season.

“It’s difficult to rank them, but reliability has been a problem at one point of the season, which we paid the price for later on with penalties and other things,” Leclerc said after the Abu Dhabi finale. “Strategy, I think we’ve done too many mistakes at one point of the season…and we don’t seem to have the understanding yet of how to have a good tire management all the time.”

The close of the 2022 season marked the end – perhaps temporary for some – in Formula 1 for Canadian Nicholas Latifi at Williams and Haas’ Mick Schumacher. Ricciardo is out at McLaren but will return to the paddock in 2023 as a reserve driver for Red Bull.

Red Bull’s first champion, Vettel hung up his gloves at the end of the season for good after two years with Aston Martin that saw the German become outspoken and political.

He championed LGBTQ2S+ rights in Saudi Arabia and Hungary, he highlighted the plight of bees in Austria, and he wore a ‘Stop Mining Tar Sands’ T-shirt in Montreal that labelled the activity “Canada’s Climate Crime.”

Following the final race of 2022, Vettel offered an emotional goodbye before he began his new life as a retiree.

“The last two years have been disappointing from a sporting point of view, but very, very useful and important to me in my life. A lot of things happened, a lot of things I realized,” he said. “I think there are far bigger and far more important things than racing in circles, but obviously it’s what we love and through that if we can transfer some of the important values, that’s big. For that the last two years have been great for me. Thank you for the messages, the letters and all the love in general. I will miss that, but it’s been an absolute joy throughout my career.”