The last year of this generation of Formula 1 cars is offering us an exciting battle between Mercedes and Red Bull, both on a dialectical and political level, as well as on a technical level on track. The clash that took place during the first lap of the British Grand Prix between Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen did nothing but create a lot more tension, with Christian Horner of Red Bull who in the past few hours confirmed the team’s intention to assess whether there is room for appealing to the penalty 10 ″ received by Lewis Hamilton in the Silverstone race.
This scenario, according to Pat Fry (Alpine technical director), is very similar to that seen in 2008, with the fight between McLaren and Ferrari which led both teams to focus late on the regulatory revolution of 2009, so much so that they started the 2009 Formula 1 season far behind and allowed to Jenson Button’s Brawn to surprisingly win the title. In an interview granted for RacingNews365, Pat Fry, at the time in the McLaren team, confessed that the historic British team concentrated on the 2009 car too late, to the point that the new car’s entry into the wind tunnel was postponed until October.
The British expert engineer explained that Mercedes and Red Bull could retrace – in negative – the footsteps of McLaren and Ferrari of 13 years ago, as the world championship fight makes you spend “hours of work, time in the wind tunnel and CFD”, that would take away developments on the 2022 project. And this aspect could open the way for Ferrari “which seems to have started working on next season before all others”, according to Pat Fry, who believes that the Maranello team – with less pressure this year – was able better than other teams to balance resources and spend time to focus on the project for the 2022 Formula One season.
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