Scrolling through the provisional standings of the 2022 Formula 1 Constructors’ World Championship after the first four races of the season, the Haas F1 team is in eighth place with 15 points. That is a team that has already scored 15 points more than last season which for them sadly ended in last place with zero Top 10 finishes, while now, after four rounds, Haas has drastically improved the situation.
This is thanks to the resources that the team has invested for the current project since the previous F1 campaign, the VF-22, which immediately proved to be very good, interesting, although at first glance few could really understand its competitiveness.
After the first points finishes, all scored by Kevin Magnussen, who proved in great shape as he returned to Formula 1, some teams, surprised by this change of direction of the team led by Guenther Steiner, began to have doubts about the nature of the VF-22 itself. Has Haas improved thanks to its close partnership with Ferrari? Is the VF-22 some kind of ‘white Ferrari’?
After a few weeks, the first answers arrived. And they came from authoritative voices. Last weekend, Simone Resta, who is currently the technical director for the Haas F1 Team and previously worked at Ferrari from 2001 to 2018, and from 2019 to 2020, as a senior design engineer, head of the R&D department, deputy chief design director and from 2014 to 2018, as Chief Designer, spoke about it.
“You know, honestly, I am only interested in my job, the work we are doing with the car, trying to improve it, trying to give the drivers a better car. All of these things are on a different level than I am currently working on. Yes, we know the rules we must respect, we respect them and we move forward “, the Italian engineer immediately clarified.
“There’s not much to say. You look at the pictures, you look and you see a lot of cars with a lot of similarities. You know, it’s … what would you say? I think everyone has to do a good job and focus on themselves. And I suppose, you know, that for a team like ours that is struggling with midfield teams maybe someone didn’t expect it. And yes, that’s the way it goes. We just have to push performance and do a better job and then the car will continue to be competitive ” – Simone Resta explained.
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Even the Haas VF-22 has not been immune to the phenomenon that has occurred since the first pre-season tests, those carried out in Barcelona. We are talking of course about porpoising, the phenomenon that, starting from a certain speed, causes ground-effect cars to bounce due to sudden downforce losses, followed by a recovery of the downforce which then continues to create this aerodynamic effect.
Haas, like all the other teams, follows and scrutinizes what the other teams bring to the track, from every point of view. Also for solving the issue of porpoising, which all the teams are trying to reduce, if not completely eliminate at this stage of the 2022 Formula 1 season:
“It is very difficult to comment on what others are doing. Porpoising is a complex phenomenon, it is difficult to manage. We are learning so much from that. We are learning how to work around it and how to improve it. We are just trying to do a better job, you know , also learning and testing in the wind tunnel and trying to develop the car. So, I don’t know what others are really experiencing, we can see from the videos that a lot of cars are bouncing, but you never know if they use a stiffer rear, what car height they’re using, etc. So it’s really hard to comment on other people’s stuff. ” – the former Ferrari chief designer said.
“What does more or less porpising depend on? I think it really depends on the type of track. In Barcelona, for example, it was quite heavy. But then we changed the car. And then in the end, it’s been pretty good so far. It went well in Bahrain. We did the test and then the race afterwards, so we were able to handle the situation well. In Saudi Arabia, with this high speed section, we were probably exposing it a little more, and the higher the speed, the worse the problem. In Australia we had it, for sure. And at Imola I think it was a little better. But again, we’re working on a car. So it’s really hard to look for all the things to do. It’s never a clean test. There are always different conditions, etc. ” – Simone Resta concluded.
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