British former racing driver from England and the 1996 Formula One World Champion Damon Hill shared his thoughts on the performances shown by Scuderia Ferrari, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes in the start of the 2022 Formula 1 season and the debate about the fastest car after the first four rounds, a topic that at this stage would seem to be a straightforward head-to-head between the Austrian and the Italian teams, whith Charles Leclerc and Max Verstappen both scoring two race wins so far.
But while Scuderia Ferrari and Red Bull have shared the victories ahead of the Miami Grand Prix, Damon Hill explained that the development fight will be very important and could bring a big shift in fortunes during the championship. Asked who he feels is the favourite for the 2022 F1 world championship at this stage of the campaign, British former racing driver admitted that it is a difficult prediction to make at this early stage of the season:
“Well, the upgrade thing is a very interesting one, because they’ve also got these constraints now that are going to apply to the teams that have had the most points from the previous season and so forth,” Damon Hill explained, in his latest appearance on the F1 Nation podcast, pointing to the aerodynamic testing restrictions sliding scale which affects how much wind tunnel and CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) time each team is allowed to use.
Asked to comment on Red Bull Chief Technical Officer Adrian Newey’s recent statements regarding the effects of the budget cap on the rate at which updates are brought to the track, Damon Hill thinks that it has added an interesting new dynamic to the battle for the world titles – “[Adrian] was saying that they have to be very careful about when they bring these upgrades and which ones they apply, because they can’t just throw stuff at it anymore,” Damon Hill added – “So they’re sitting down and thinking about it, and it’s a bit like playing poker. They need to know which card to lay down when. Do they play their ace now, or do they wait a couple of races until they’re absolutely sure that what they’re going to play is the winning hand?”
So far Scuderia Ferrari has not introduced any significant upgrade packages in 2022, as Damon Hill confirmed he is looking forward to seeing how the top teams perform as the season progresses: “I’d like to see a season where you get leapfrogging,. Maybe Red Bull played their little trump card at Imola, and they’re hanging on for a bit, but maybe Ferrari now have a package and are going to bring it in to play in Miami. That [would] be good, so you can’t predict the form through the season, and that [would] be great.”
While the 1996 Formula One World Champion couldn’t be drawn on whether he would back Red Bull or the Maranello team in the fight for the titles, he also Mercedes might join the duel in second part of the season: “They’re off the pace – almost a second off the pace. But that’s because they can’t get their car low enough because of this porpoising” – he added.
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Damon Hill feels that the world champions could find a lot more performance very fast after they will be able to fix the bouncing issues and understand their W13 more: “Looking at the front end of these cars, they’ve got these dampers – fairly serious-looking bits of kit that are doing something. I’m wondering whether it’s just simply a damper that, when the car decks, it somehow stops it from springing back up again quite so much. It could be the actual floor hitting that’s setting off the oscillation. There’s some complicated contraptions underneath the front end of some of the cars. If Mercedes can work out to get the car lower, it’s an exponential curve. It doesn’t go up linearly, it’ll go up exponentially. If you can get your car half a centimetre lower, you get maybe double the amount of downforce or efficiency. So they’ve got to control that really difficult increment in downforce. It wants to suck so hard that it actually wants to suck onto the ground. You’ve got to get it as close as you can without it hitting a bump and then releasing and going into that crazy oscillation we’ve seen. So we haven’t seen the full potential of the Mercedes car is what I’m saying. We’re so early in the development of these new regulations. There’s this really tantalising massive carrot that’s dangling right in front of them but they can’t get to it!” – he concluded.
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