Austrian former Formula 1 racing driver Christian Klien, who currently competes full-time in the GT World Challenge Europe for JP Motorsport, was asked about Scuderia Ferrari’s 2022 Formula 1 season, as the Maranello team was not able to keep up with their Red Bull rivals. Christian Klien feels that the Italian side also underestimated the Austrian team, which eventually proved to be the biggest mistake.
That tale of Scuderia Ferrari’s 2022 campaign should have been very different given the great start of the season. Sadly, it proved to be the story of a team which began the championship so brightly only to lose their way after the first three rounds, in which Charles Leclerc had secured race wins in Australia and Bahrain.
What followed was a series of errors: power unit technical failures, several poor strategy decisions and a few driver mistakes led to the Maranello team’s demise and allowed Red Bull and Max Verstappen to easily win both championship despite a difficult start for them.
The Dutchman has taken victory in six of the last seven Grands Prix of the season, which added to his six race wins in the first 11 events, gave Max Verstappen the 2022 F1 Drivers’ title with four races until the end of the campaign.
Scuderia Ferrari now wants to take advantage of the remaining events to prepare for the 2023 F1 championship, as Christian Klien points out that for the Maranello team the first lesson needs to be avoiding the errors.
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During his interview for the F1 Nation podcast, he was asked about what Ferrari need to do to come back stronger next year: “I think they just have to come together more as a team. Stop making mistakes on the strategy side. It feels like technical issues hurt them as well a little bit, there were a few mistakes from the drivers as well.”
The former F1 driver feels part of the issue is represented by the many years in which Ferrari has not faced the pressure of fighting for the championship. The Italian side’s last title dates back to the 2007 campaign, when Kimi Raikkonen became F1 world champion after a dramatic final race. Since that moment, Ferrari was involved in a few title challenges with Fernando Alonso and Sebastian Vettel, but most of the times had themselves to blame for missing out on the overall win.
As Red Bull was involved in a close duel against Mercedes for the 2021 Formula 1 titles, Christian Klien thinks the Austrian side proved to better prepared for the fight.
“Ferrari for the first time in a long time they were actually fighting for a World Championship, and I think in this area Max was just more calm,” he added, pointed out that “Red Bull was more ready to fight for the championship. And if it’s that close, you can’t afford all these little mistakes. If you think beginning of the season, it almost felt like it’s a clear run for Ferrari this year because they were that dominant with the car but they underestimated how quickly Red Bull were turning it around and how complete they are as a team.” – he continued.
Despite winning two out of the first three races of the current season, the Bahrain Grand Prix and the Austrian Grand Prix, Charles Leclerc only managed one single other victory in 2022. The former F1 driver was asked whether he felt Max Verstappen should be seen as the batter driver at this stage of their careers, Christian Klien replied: “I don’t think so, I think Charles is equally talented. I mean some of his pole position laps that he put together this year was just unbelievable. I also think he has the race craft.”
The F1-75 car has not been able to manage the tyres as good as the RB18 in this second half of the season, which made it impossible for Charles to match his rival’s race pace: “If you have a bigger tyre degradation during the race there’s not much that you can do as a driver,” he concluded.
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