John N
F1 is back! After all the crashes and launches and Ferrari fever of 2018, all the teams have now arrived in Barcelona, ready to start the new season. Now’s the time to look ahead – what should you be keeping an eye on over the coming F1 preseason? Let’s find out.
- A new era of F1 begins
The first real look at the new-for-’22 cars will come in pre-season testing next week at Barcelona. All 10 teams are bringing their box-fresh challengers for the first time, all shod with the proper 18-inch Pirelli tires. With the new generation of cars comes a new generation of racing, with hopes that wheel-to-wheel racing will improve in one of the largest regulation overhauls in F1’s 72-year history. We’ll have to wait until the Bahrain Grand Prix on March 20 and the 22 ensuing races to see whether all that work has paid off. However, the first days of pre-season running will be a fascinating, watershed moment.
- Who’s showing their true hand – and who’s sandbagging?
The upcoming pre-season testing in Barcelona will be a little more unpredictable than usual, with various systems checks, aero tests, and different fuel levels altering the running order each day. Live timing won’t be available either, so fans won’t be able to follow along as the fastest cars go faster. There’s also a two-week break until the Official Pre-Season Test starts in Bahrain on March 10, so teams may not want to show their full hand in Barcelona and may just focus on pounding out laps reliably instead. So although it will be fun to see all of the new cars during pre-season testing, we won’t get a sense of this season’s winner until testing resumes in Bahrain on March 10.
- New and returning faces
It’s always fun to see new drivers and teams make their debut at the beginning of the F1 season. It’s also exciting to see drivers who have been away from F1 for a while come back. The driver market wasn’t as wild this year as it has been in the last few winters, but it’s still exciting to see how Formula 1 rookies George Russell and Valtteri Bottas perform in their new rides.
Alex Albon endured a frustrating year out of frontline F1 racing in 2021. But the Thai racer is back with Williams for this season, stepping into the big shoes of his good friend and former teammate, Russell—and surely keen to demonstrate why he deserves his place on the grid. There is a sole rookie of the year, with Zhou Guanyu alongside Bottas at Alfa Romeo. Set to be the first-ever Chinese F1 driver to start a Grand Prix in Bahrain, Zhou will want to hit the ground running in Spain—while the level-headed Bottas should prove a great mentor for the 22-year-old in the Alfa garage.
- Will teams practice following another car?
Not a guaranteed ones, but with the massive regulation overhaul for 2022, we’d expect the drivers to be curious about what it’s like to follow another car in the new breed of F1 machinery. The 2022 regulations have placed a large onus on the use of shaped venturi tunnels in the floor of the cars to generate the majority of their down force – via a phenomenon known as the the ‘ground effect’. The theory goes that, with down force being predominantly created under the cars, and the resultant aerodynamic wake then thrown high up into the air as it exits the diffuser, following another car through a corner should be a far less aerodynamically disrupted process than it was previously. But with teams only allowed to run one car per day, will we see the likes of ‘sister teams’ AlphaTauri and Red Bull cooperating to gather data on car-following behavior? Let’s wait and see when the running begins at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya from February 23-25.
