By Hisham Hilal | Staff Writer
It would appear that the pecking order laid out in preseason testing is actually playing out on track after the first race of the season. Notably, with some exceptions that are surely guaranteed to shake up the grid for the rest of the year. The Bahrain Grand Prix ended with a dominant Ferrari 1-2. Haas looked strong with comeback kid Kevin Magnusson, all while taking a solid P5 finish, picking up where he left off and bringing the previously struggling team back to points form. Alfa Romeo recovered from their testing troubles and took an impressive double points finish. New signing Valtteri Bottas did as promised and rookie Guanyu Zhou impressed on debut. McLaren appear to have struggled the most, running at the back of the grid and failing to be anywhere near the midfield. They are not alone as every Mercedes customer team seems to have been hit hard with these regulations. With the last six positions being every Mercedes powered car, the team lost some pace but is still in the points. Red Bull looked strong in qualifying reigning world champion Max Verstappen who took P2 on the grid and his teammate Perez who lined up P4, right between the Ferrari duo of Charles Leclerc – who scored pole position- and Carlos Sainz who took P3. Red Bull were having a solid race, challenging Ferrari until unexpected reliability issues hit, which took both cars out of the race. This allowed Lewis Hamilton to take advantage and score a podium which his Mercedes W13 wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. Alpha Tauri’s Pierre Gasly also went out with an engine failure, which may seem to be an extension of Red Bull’s reliability issues, but his car went out with an electrical problem while both Red Bulls suffered from a fuel pump issue.
Ferrari have set out on a recovery program after a disastrous 2020 and a solid 2021 season, where they finished 3rd in the constructors championship while focusing their development on the 2022 car. This focus definitely paid off as we saw a dominant display in Bahrain, however, that 1-2 finish wasn’t as straightforward as it seemed. Defending champion Max Verstappen challenged Leclerc for the lead throughout the first half of the race, with the two engaging in a fierce wheel-to-wheel battle going back and forth over several corners over one lap, for three consecutive laps. Such close racing hasn’t been seen for a while in F1 even with a thrilling battle like the one between Hamilton and Verstappen last year. While this shows that these new cars did their job of allowing closer racing, it also laid out the scene for what could potentially be the title picture throughout the season. Red Bull, however, were running into some issues throughout, with the team telling Verstappen to take it easy on the outlap in an effort to minimize certain problems undetected at the time, much to the champ’s annoyance. The blight that would end the race for both Red Bulls – allowing Carlos Sainz to snatch second and Hamilton to swoop up third place – was eventually a fuel pump issue that just stopped the engines. This came as a result of Red Bull not doing low fuel runs and even a full race simulation during preseason testing, which left this issue hidden as not enough data was gathered on the new E10 fuel. While the speed trap figures did show that the new Red Bull badged Honda engines are the fastest, this performance might have come at the cost of reliability.
Meanwhile Mercedes’ struggles became clear after qualifying with Hamilton and Russell taking 5th and 9th on the grid respectively. While they have had a history of claiming to be slow in preseason only to be sandbagging, this year, it became clear that the 8 time back-to-back champions are legitimately on the back foot. Their main issue being the porpoising effect, a common side effect in ground-effect cars, which results in high bouncing on the straights if the cars are not calibrated enough. While every team figured a way around the issue, Mercedes is the most effective. Along with that was the low rear down force with high tyre degradation. Mercedes’ radical no sidepod design led to the engine being in a very tight package, this along with the need for changes to suit the E10 fuel might have also led to a loss in power. As evident with Williams, Aston Martin and McLaren being the slowest teams in the first race. The latter especially being affected by added issues like brake cooling and lack of downforce, throwing McLaren off the pace and many steps back after a solid 2021 campaign.
A Ferrari pole position, win, and 1-2, all their first since 2019 and a very strong showing for a title comeback, Mercedes struggling and some unexpected reliability issues for Red Bull. However, Red Bull solving the reliability problems is a simple matter of when rather than if, which would lay the title battle between them and Ferrari. Mercedes has the ability to recover some pace as well, however, by the admission of the team themselves, that is still a long way before them and the main issue is still not known, and if it is its solution is a mystery. What is clear, however, is that this is shaping to be one hell of a season (no small feat after 2021), with an abundance of talent and even tighter competition.