Red Bull and Max Verstappen have taken another important step towards the 2022 Formula 1 world title. After two Grands Prix where he was more in defense than on the attack (at Silverstone for having collected a debris that made his RB18 lose 20% of the overall downforce, in Austria due to poor optimization of the entire package also in terms of updates brought to the track), the Dutch world champion returned to victory at the Circuit Paul Ricard in Le Castellet, Var.
The Red Bull driver won the French GP ahead of Lewis Hamilton and George Russell, both in Mercedes, while poleman Charles Leclerc (Ferrari) retired due to an accident. “The world championship has become complicated, but it is not yet impossible, and we will enjoy it even more if we manage to reverse the situation.” – said Mattia Binotto after the race – “We have to stay focused on every single race because we have great potential that, for one reason or another, we have not converted into points”.
Ferrari with a lot of oversteer in the first laps? A strategy to protect the front tires
For Ferrari there was a lot of anticipation for this French weekend as last year the SF21 had disappointed and underperformed due to an embarrassing tire management. In fact, when you arrive at Paul Ricard, you can only talk about tire management, especially the front train. Precisely in this regard, the technicians of the Italian team worked a lot between FP2 and FP3 after noticing some annoying graining during the second free practice session.
It was therefore decided to move the F1-75 balance forward a lot, even too much for FP3, which was then limited and corrected for qualifying. This choice generated oversteer in qualifying, something that Verstappen’s RB18 had suffered since Friday, not Charles Leclerc’s F1-75 which had appeared perfect in behavior during the qualifying simulation, only to immediately lose performance due to graining during the race pace simulations.
The compromise useful to safeguard the front tires brought the two cars closer not only in qualifying, with a hypothetical advantage of ‘only’ 2 tenths in case Ferrari had not used Carlos Sainz to give his team mate a tow in the second part of the Mistral and Signes, but also in the race. In the early stages of the French GP there was a lot of oversteer on the F1-75, with very round and rather strange lines for an Italian car that always tends to travel fewer meters than the RB18. Everything depended on a strategy designed to safeguard the front tires, thanks to a particular setting of the differential, that macro mechanical component useful for distributing the torque on each of the wheels. Depending on how it is set, the behavior of a car can be changed, from oversteer (lower values) to understeer (higher values).
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In order tp bring the front tyres to the correct temperature (especially the Mediums) and because Ferrari was aware of the fact that with these tires it could not afford to let them slip too much during the Paul Ricard warm-up phase, otherwise the annoying graining would appear (the process of heating the surface too fast while the heart of the tire is still cold), the Maranello team decided to move the F1-75 balance further forward during the early stages of the race thanks to a particular differential setup, as confirmed by Paolo D’Alessandro and Giuliano Duchessa for formu1a.uno. This is why both F1-75 cars slipped a lot on the rear axle in the first few laps, something that was resolved after the tires were brought to the correct temperature (“Tires are ready”); the F1-75 still tended to oversteer, Charles Leclerc’s error is an example, but the set-up had certainly become a little more neutral than at the start of the race, albeit always moved forward enough to even prevent the blistering on the front right.
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