British former professional racing driver Damon Hill, who won the Formula 1 world championship back in 1996, feels that the fear of breaching the budget cap limit in the 2022 F1 season may determine Scuderia Ferrari to once again race with limited power, even if Brazil should not be as hard on the Ferrari engine as was the case last time out in Mexico City.
At the 4.304-kilometre Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez in Mexico, both Ferrari F1-75 cars were far behind Red Bull and Mercedes, unable to match the pace of the RB18 and W13 cars. One of the main causes was the high altitude in Mexico, which represented a big issue for the Ferrari turbo because it is smaller than the one on the Mercedes and Honda power units.
Given the circumstances, Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz had to settle for a fifth and sixth place finish in Mexico, as Damon Hill believes the Brazilian Grand Prix could again be a difficult weekend for the Maranello team. While Interlagos is not located at an altitude at high as Mexico City, the Autódromo José Carlos Pace race track is still around 700 metres above sea level which means Scuderia Ferrari may have to sacrifice engine power in favour of reliability, also taking into consideration the budget cap implications.
But at the same time, the Italian side has to score a good result in Brazil in order to defend its second place in the Constructors’ standings, with Mercedes now just 40 points behind with two races until the end of the 2022 Formula 1 championship.
In a recent discussion for the F1 Nation podcast, former F1 driver Damon Hill was asked if Scuderia Ferrari should do everything possible not just to secure P2 in the standings but also try to defeat Red Bull for a race win, even with the risk of suffering more reliability issues, but the 1996 world champion pointed out the fact that the budget cap may dictate a different approach:
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“Can they give it full beans?” host Tom Clarkson asked. “If it were me, I would definitely risk it if I were them because Charles Leclerc didn’t have any reliability issues in in Austria and it’s the same kind of altitude [in Brazil]. No but you’ve forgotten the cost cap, haven’t you?” Damon Hill replied – “You can’t go blowing up engines everywhere, extra costs and all that. They have to be really careful. It sounds to me like they’re running to the end, trying to conserve, lick their wounds and move on to next year. They’re not getting upgrades, they’re not getting development, they’re probably going to be conserving their power units as well, because it’ll add up in terms of cost.”
Damon Hill also thinks that maybe the Maranello team could be considering an interesting strategy by attempting to finish the 2022 F1 campaign in third place with the goal of having more time available in the wind tunnel for 2023:
“The better you do, the less chance you have of improving,” he said. “The guys at the back have a bigger window of improvement if they can afford to do it. You know where I’m going. They’re sitting there going ‘well hang on a minute, we might get a bit more wind tunnel time if we don’t come second in the Constructors’ Championship.’ It’s win or bust for Ferrari, they’re not interested whether it’s second or third [so] ‘we may as well finish third because we’ll get more wind tunnel time,’” Tom Clarkson replied – “They will actually have to be making those calculations because it may be you don’t want to come second,” Damon Hill concluded.
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