A new F1 year is finally upon us and the first race just came to its conclusion. Was it the conclusion we were hoping for? If you are Bottas, then definitely yes. If you are anybody else, maybe not.
As a life-long Ferrari supporter, I think I already have to lower my expectations for the rest of the season. We had a change in leadership over the winter break, they told us everything was going to change. We had the Barcelona’s tests, they showed us everything was going to change. Then the first qualifying session comes around, and predictably nothing actually changed. Despite an underwhelming grid positioning, we still had our hopes high for the race. The alarm clock was set and then….nothing happened.
Not just from a Ferrari point of view…nothing happened in the entire race. Nice overtaking manoeuvre from Bottas at the first corner and then off he went for the rest of the race. Our Ferrari boys could only see a distant blurry image of their contenders. Only Verstappen seemed to have some fire inside, getting a way too easy jump on Vettel, and a semi-exciting conclusion with the hunt on Hamilton. The Ferrari boys finished more than 30 seconds away from third place, a distance that in F1 is equivalent to days in real life.
It could have been much worse of course. It could have been a disaster of the scale Riccardo had to suffer. Destroying his front wing after 10 meters of race, only to end up retiring his car half way through the race. Or, our hopes could’ve gone up in flames, as Sainz’s Renault engine did. It appears Renault still hasn’t figure out a proper way to deal with engine and aero, the same way Honda and Red Bull did. If you watched the new Netflix F1 documentary (highly recommended by the way), you would know how Christian Horner kept saying if Ricciardo made the right move switching teams; it looks like he may regret this decision.
The final most disappointing element of the new season is related to its big promise: a new redesigned front wing, to allow drivers to get closer to each other and deliver more overtaking possibilities during the race. Guess what: the race delivered us exactly the opposite. Yes drivers were close to each other, but no one manage to pull off a significant overtaking manoeuvre at all. The final order was pretty much exactly the starting one, if you remove the three cars that retired and a couple of overtakes during pits stops.
It’s obvious at this point that I have many emotions related to the new F1 season. It’s of course super early to draw any kind of conclusions (but it’s fun to do nevertheless). It looks like it may be a very long and hard season once again for Ferrari.
Overall, F1 hasn’t changed that much.
Charlie, we are going to miss you smile a lot, but you are not going to miss much instead.