Formula 1 French Grand Prix 2022 – My Take

It will be a brief analysis today as it has been the poorest race of the season so far, both from an entertaining point of view and from a technical one.

The screenplay is quite the same for a while now, with Ferrari slightly better on the Saturday and Red Bull with a better race car; after losing the pole Verstappen immediately showed his confidence in overtaking Leclerc, thanks to a better tyre management and straight line speed.
Unfortunately the Monegasque gifted him the win hitting the tyre barrier while pushing close to the first pit-stop window, when the Dutch tried the undercut a couple of laps earlier.
It’s a bad mistake but when you’re forced to come from behind, with an inferior car, and you’re always over the limit, it’s the kind of things that can happen; many great Champions of the past have suffered similar situations.

To me, unless the rules change in Spa will produce a stronger than expected re-shuffle, yesterday’s race marks the end of the title race, at least for the drivers’ one.
Red Bull once again departed from France with a win and a gain in both standings in a weekend where probably the Austrian car was in its lower form.

Mercedes pulled off a consistent race after they were extremely disappointed wit the gap in qualifying, as they seem to still struggle in making the car and the upgrades to work efficiently; they’re now waiting for the Belgian Grand Prix, where the paddock rumors are saying they’ll present an update fully aligned with the new rules that should give them an advantage compared to the Scuderia and Red Bull.
We’ll find out only at the end of the summer whether these rumors are true or not.
What’s certain is that, despite such a performance gap every weekend, Hamilton is closer to Leclerc in the standings than the Monegasque is to Verstappen, proving that with the right turnaround they can still fight for interesting positions.

Other than that, the Paul Ricard has been unfortunately ruined and it fails consistently to deliver entertaining races, so the mid-pack battle didn’t happen; Alpine and McLaren appear to be well ahead the others, among which Haas has the flair to join the battle with those two but it is often slowed down by misfortune, crashes and the unreliable Ferrari power unit.
I think that if they remove most of the asphalt in the run-off areas, making it a proper circuit, and get rid of the chicane in the middle of the straight, the Le Castellet track has an interesting layout which could be more challenging and produce spectacular races.

In one week time the power balance could shift again as we’ll race in the unique Hungaroring before the summer break; let’s see if something unpredictable will add some twist to this Championship story.