Formula 1 Bahrain Grand Prix 2022 – My Take

Let’s start with a small premise: yes, I’m Italian but I’m not a nationalist, I’m not the kind of person that supports a driver or a team only because they’re Italian.
Also, I’ve been very critical about the last eight years of the hybrid-era, not because who was winning but due to the low level of entertainment and interest generated by a unseen-before supremacy and the poor technical content of what should have been the queen of motorsport categories.
Even last year’s artificial show was more appropriate for a Netflix TV series rather than for the history books of Formula 1.

So, hopefully you already understood that from my previous posts, I’m not a Ferrari fan, nor a Hamilton hater or a Red Bull supporter; I’m an engineer and a competitor, I love motorsport and pure competition.

That said, I’ve been really excited all winter long and even more after each car presentation because finally it seems that the Formula 1 Management is going into the right direction, imposing rule changes to all competitors, trying to create more fair and balanced races.
I still hope they’ll be more extreme in this direction, maybe taking some of my ideas.

The first GP hasn’t disappointed, with teams struggling in different areas and various ways, which has generated opposed tyre strategies and peaks of performance during the race; and that led to overtaking, battles and uncertainty from the beginning to the end, at the front and at the back of the pack.
Is this temporary? Maybe, it’s possible that the completely new approach hasn’t still be fully understood by everybody at the same time and that all team will converge sooner or later on similar solutions and concepts; in this sense, it’s a little bit of a shame that many components will be frozen for years, and the ability to upgrade cars is restrained by Technical and Financial Regulations.
It would be great to have this uncertainty every year, and I think it will be enough to give everybody more design freedom rather than a big twisting of Technical Rules every time.

But so far we can enjoy a proper motorsport show, entertaining but not artificial, where drivers, team principals and engineers all have their own role in leading the team to success.

Going into the details of the Bahrain GP 2022, even being fully aware that it’s absolutely too early to deliver any verdicts, I think we can already identify the first technical indications and points of interests.

Ferrari has developed a strong and so far reliable power unit in collaboration with Shell, which apparently is giving great advantages with their fuel and lubricants.
Furthermore, their aerodynamic solution with wide sidepods seems to be the easiest one to set-up and the one producing less porpoising, meaning that they didn’t have to raise the car from the ground too much to reduce it, which generate big losses (for example Aston Martin is the one suffering the most from this, with an estimate 0.75s per lap loss from the ideal configuration).
I believe the strong performances from Haas and Alfa are also indicators of the above; now, does that mean that Ferrari’s sidepods solution will be the best? Too early to call, but surely the advantage will last for the first races.

Red Bull looks to me still the best aerodynamic package all around, and we may soon have confirmation of that in Jeddah, which should suit them even better than the Bahrain circuit.
They still have a big unknown about the engine situation, and I’m not saying this because of the double retirement; Honda has basically left and the Austrian manufacturer launched an engine program as well, with the Japanese supplier providing a background support and trying to purchase some engineers on the market but, given the complexity of these power units, and the extremely high level of reliability needed these days in Formula 1, it seems a tough situation to cope with and it may take a while to get everything running smoothly; it will all depends how many “zeros” they’ll have by then.

Mercedes, and all their satellite teams, looked a lot behind, more than I and probably everyone else were expecting.
Now they have money and technical skills to come back, so it will be a big mistake to consider them out of the fight, but it really seems that their extreme aerodynamic design is also affecting the engine performance (maybe because of cooling temperatures?) and I’m definitely convinced that they’re running safe engine modes to avoid cooking engines from the first race.
While Toto, Lewis and George don’t appear worried about the power unit, especially the drivers are not confident about a quick recovery as porpoising seem to affect them heavily and I don’t think they have much interest in playing mind games now that the season has started.
Sorting a bad aerodynamic concept is not easy, especially with races coming one after the other and no testing.

The fortunes of the others are unfortunately strictly connected to the ones of their main suppliers, which has also caused a big earthquake in the hierarchies in the midfield and at the back; in this case as well it will take even more caution in considering what we saw yesterday as a trend for the season.
McLaren is still working heavily on set-ups with the new suspensions design, Aston Martins are slowed down by porpoising similarly to Mercedes, Haas and Alfas are benefitting from the similar concepts to Ferrari, while Williams and Alpha Tauri don’t appear to have found anything special for this season.
I’m quite disappointed by the Alpine team, as they should and could have dedicated all their efforts from the last couple of years to this new era, similarly to the Scuderia, but again they seem stuck in the fight for the bottom part of the points positions, with a car that looks ok but doesn’t excel in any area, including the power unit.

I’m really looking forward to the next race in Jeddah.

What did you think about the first race of the 2022 season?
Let me know in the comments below.