Hello and welcome to another edition of This Week, if you\u2019re wondering what\u2019s happened to F1 Today we have had other commitments and our focus has been on uploading a new section of the website which we have been working on for the last six months progress will continue over the next few weeks.<\/p>\n
This week continues to be about looking ahead to the season ahead, this time next month we would be in-between tests we might get a hint of what could be ahead in the years ahead. But while everyone speculates about the impact of the regulation changes, we should be cautious, but we can still hope for the conclusion of the Abu Dhabi controversy.<\/p>\n
The FIA\u2019s head of F1 Peter Bayer has suggested that the sport could have a new race director in 2022 following the controversial Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. We all know the story by now, and seven weeks on the controversy around the restart with one lap to go allowed Max Verstappen to pass his title rival Lewis Hamilton.<\/p>\n
Despite an extraordinary meeting of the World Motor Sport Council, there had been speculation that the report could come sooner. The FIA says that the meeting will in essence be to address “housekeeping” issues, such as the appointment of senate members, that follows the transition from former president Jean Todt to the new administration.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile one of the changes that the BBC are reporting is a restructure of race control, the FIA’s plans are to introduce a series of safeguards that will leave the race director freer to make decisions in a calmer environment. Backing up Bayer, the sources told the BBC that a new race director will be installed for the 2022 season.<\/p>\n
Pirelli believes that the increased chance of one-stop races this year should not worry fans if the racing is better on track. As part of the technical regulation changes and a move to ground effect cars, new eighteen-inch tyres will also be introduced. A lot of talk since the start of the year has been about the expectations with these changes but we don\u2019t know until we get a few races into the season.<\/p>\n
The Singapore Grand Prix has signed a new seven-year contract to stay on the calendar until 2028. The race is one of the highlights of the season and was the first night race but has been cancelled in the last two years because of the pandemic, a new seven-year deal has now been agreed.<\/p>\n
minor adjustments will be made to the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix’s Jeddah Street Circuit to improve driver visibility around corners, organisers announced on Thursday. One of the concerns at last month\u2019s race was visibility along the high-speed waterfront.<\/p>\n
Saudi Motorsport Company Chief Executive Martin Whitaker said in a statement, \u201cThese tweaks are directly related to a drivers’ sightline from the cockpit. It’s minimal work, but it will help improve forward visibility in a couple of corners.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mercedes were the latest team to speak about the regulation changes with technical director James Allison saying they are fraught with \u201cjeopardy\u201d and \u201clandmines,\u201d while insisting they have the opportunity to prove they haven’t been “lucky” with their previous title-winning cars.<\/p>\n
We are often repeating ourselves when talking about these changes, either we have a 2009, 2014 situation where a team comes out of it so dominant or we have a situation where several teams are fighting for the championship.<\/p>\n
Allison said in a Mercedes preview video for 2022, \u201cThe ruleset is not only enormous – the regulations are about twice the size of what’s preceded them – but they’re all almost entirely different from what came before them. – That has meant we’ve had to redesign the car from tip to toe, everywhere you look it’s completely new.\u201d<\/p>\n
Red Bull have announced Honda will continue to supply power units to Red Bull directly from Japan until the end of the current engine regulations, in a dramatic change of plan. Honda announced in 2020 that they were quitting the sport at the end of last year to focus on new technologies with this year being a transition to Red Bull.<\/p>\n
The original strategy as announced late last year was that the new Red Bull Powertrains division would take complete power units from Honda, with full engineering support at the tracks, only in 2022. Helmut Mako Red Bull\u2019s advisor says the intention is Honda continue to supply complete engines from Japan to Red Bull and AlphaTauri until the end of 2025.<\/p>\n
The change has been made in part to ensure that RBP will still be a new participant when its own engine is introduced in 2026. It will thus benefit from the concessions that are being discussed mainly to help encourage the VW Group to finally commit to F1, such as a higher power unit budget cap.<\/p>\n
I think this is maybe a sign that Honda may be interested in staying in the sport after 2026, or as Dr Helmut Marko said gives Red Bull four years to develop the power train division. Marko suggested that winning the 2021 world championship has encouraged Honda to remain closer to F1 than had been expected.<\/p>\n
Ferrari has had to make a last-minute change to its test plans for Fiorano this week amid uncertainty over F1\u2019s rules. The team had planned to run a four-day test as an opportunity for the drivers to get back up to speed with F1 cars, Ferrari mechanics and engineers will also be on hand to get themselves best prepared as possible for the challenges ahead.<\/p>\n
Daniel Ricciardo has been given the Australian equivalent of an MBE an AO by the queens reprehensive in the country, for \u201csignificant service to motorsport as a competitor and ambassador, and to the community.\u201d<\/p>\n
The announcement of his appointment recognises both his sporting achievements and his string of charitable affiliations, including the grassroots Ricciardo’s Racers programme run by Motorsport Australia.<\/p>\n
Technical director James Key says one of the things they are focusing on in the design of this year’s car is producing a \u2018all-rounder,\u2019 last year the team performed well on high-speed tracks but had an inherent low-speed weakness. The regulation changes should allow teams to reset and try to address any issues they have historically.<\/p>\n
Key told Motorsport.com, the team hopes to address some of those weaknesses and deliver a more balanced car in 2022. Saying, \u201cWe did pay a lot of attention to drag on the 2020 car, and as we did for the \u201919 car, that was a bit before my time, but I know that was a priority for that car and it all carried through.\u201d<\/p>\n
Alpine CEO Laurent Rossi has admitted the team was “lost” at the beginning of 2021, but said its fluctuating form became “more linear than you think” after understanding the car better. The team had a mixed season with constancy fluctuating between fifth and seventeenth with points finishes being irregular.<\/p>\n
He said that following Monaco the team started to understand the car and in the second half of the season the team started to put in strong results while struggling at high speed and downforce circuits. Let’s look at the final five races, Rossi explained that tracks with low grip tarmac, like Austin, proved to be weaknesses for Alpine.\u00a0 The poor race in both Austin and Mexico City allowed Alpha Tauri to level the points in the battle for fifth.<\/p>\n
The team also announced their launch date for Monday 21st<\/sup> February in a short video they confirmed the car would be called the A522.<\/p>\n Alpha Tauri team principal Franz Tost says Yuki Tsunoda has his future in his own hands after being handed a second season despite having a difficult debut season. The Japanese driver did show flashes of speed and potential in his first season, however, he also had various crashes and errors.<\/p>\n I think Tsunoda needs to improve and stop making mistakes, as well as them being more obvious when you saw his teammate Pierre Gasly pull off some incredible results and as Tost said it was \u201ca fantastic example\u201d of what a rookie season should be. It’s similar to the Haas situation and the way Mick Schumacher has outshone Nikita Mazepin.<\/p>\n Tsunoda needs to improve or he won\u2019t have a long career he admitted he was surprised to get a second season, I don\u2019t know the context, that quote from David Coulthard. But we need to see him improved<\/p>\n The team has also announced they will launch the 2022 car on Monday 14th<\/sup> of February but didn\u2019t give any more information about how they would launch the car.<\/p>\n Guanyu Zhou belies that he has no better teammate for his debut season than Valtteri Bottas who he described as \u201copen.\u201d Bottas has ten year\u2019s experience but the problem the Finn may have is that so much of his career with Mercedes power and will need to adapt to the Ferrari.<\/p>\n Zhou believes that Bottas is going to be \u201ca great reference and a very strong teammate.\u201d We know that a few weeks ago Fred Vassuer spoke about building the team around Bottas, and that his confidence may have been knocked after five years up against Lewis Hamilton. But its going to be interesting to see whether he can emerge from that shadow and become a team leader.<\/p>\n The team believe this season because of extra sponsorship the team will be able to run close to the $140m cap. The team appear to be in the strongest position in a decade and remember Alfa Romeo aren\u2019t like Mercedes, McLaren, Ferrari, Alfa Romeo is effectively the sponsor as the team is operated by the Sauber Group, and that means sponsorship because they can\u2019t make up any deficits under the cap by chucking cash at car development.<\/p>\n Recently Vasseur told Motorsport.com: “We still have some negotiations in progress, on the sponsor side and so on, but I think we’ll be very close to the budget cap. This is a mega opportunity for the company. I’m convinced of that. I’m not just speaking about the company, but even for the team, to know that you are at the limit. This is a different approach, a different mentality. It will be a good push for everybody.”<\/p>\n Mick Schumacher says his debut season was made easier by there being no pressure on him to secure a fresh contract. The German said in an interview on Friday reflecting on the season he explained having a multi-year contract made his debut season easier.<\/p>\n Reflecting on the season and whether or not things were harder than he expected, Schumacher said that things were actually better because of the security of having a multi-year contract in place.<\/p>\n He explained \u201cNot tougher. I think it\u2019s been easier than I expected to be honest. Again, there\u2019s not that pressure of having to say \u2018what are you going to do next year?\u2019 It\u2019s like, if you deliver most of the time you\u2019ll have a cockpit for next year. So it\u2019s all about yourself, really. There\u2019s nothing from the outside that can influence that decision, really.\u201d<\/p>\n Over the last few weeks, we have often said that Schumacher made the most of the car he had last year and outshone his teammate Nikita Mazepin and that I think as well as the team being honest about focusing on the regulation changes for this year.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n That\u2019s all from This Week, due to annual leave we are pausing this after four editions which we have enjoyed writing we will be back Sunday 20th<\/sup> February <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hello and welcome to another edition of This Week, if you\u2019re wondering what\u2019s happened to F1 Today we have had other commitments and our focus has been on uploading a new section of the website which we have been working on for the last six months progress will continue over the next few weeks. This<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10049,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,18],"tags":[51,664,694,754,1996],"class_list":["post-10163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-this-week","tag-51","tag-f1","tag-features","tag-formula-one","tag-this-week"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.f1vault.co.uk\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.f1vault.co.uk\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.f1vault.co.uk\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.f1vault.co.uk\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.f1vault.co.uk\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.f1vault.co.uk\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10163\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.f1vault.co.uk\/index\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.f1vault.co.uk\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.f1vault.co.uk\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.f1vault.co.uk\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Alpha Tauri<\/h4>\n
Alfa Romeo<\/h4>\n
Haas<\/h4>\n