Red Bull expecting “very strong Ferrari” in fast corners of Spanish GP. Christian Horner previews the next round of the season.

The Miami Grand Prix weekend is now over and the focus shifts to the next round of the 2022 Formula 1 championship, the Spanish Grand Prix, which takes place at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelò and will be immediately followed by the Monaco Grand Prix. The Spanish Grand Prix will be a key moemnt of the season, because it is the traditional venue for the debut of important evolutionary packages from the teams.

Winning in Spain means being able to count on a project capable of proving to be competitive on most tracks and is the goal of Ferrari after the ‘technical’ defeats which the Maranello team has suffered in Imola and Miami, where Red Bull – albeit slightly – was overall better performing over the race distance, especially with medium tires.

It was in Barcelona during the first pre-testing session, with the lights off, that the Scuderia from Maranello had found the feedback it hoped for from the F1-75 car, an ambitious and courageous project on which the men led by Mattia Binotto worked hard for a long time to be able to capitalize on the new rules and regulation for the 2022 Formula One campaign.

The Barcelona pre-season testing session was also the moment we saw that Ferrari and Red Bull had chosen opposing philosophies in designing their cars for the new season, with the technicians from Maranello and Milton Keynes amazed at how two cars so different from each other as the F1-75 and the RB-18 prove to be so close on track at every race so far.

Ferrari has focused on downforce, Red Bull on efficiency to achieve excellent top speed on the straights. The latest comparison in Miami, however, highlighted a trend that was hardly predictable, namely that Red Bull made a difference in the slow corners below 100 km / h, while the Ferrari was excellent in the fast corners like 5, 6 and 7. It is no coincidence that Max Verstappen made his mistake in the second run of Q3 in an attempt to limit the damage at the point where Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz were consistently faster than him.

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Red Bull team principal Christian Horner also confirmed that in view of Barcelona, Red Bull expects a Ferrari ready to be very strong in the fast corners regardless of the upgrade package they have been working on at Maranello since the start of the season: “Ferrari in Barcelona will be very strong in the fast corners, 3 and 9 in particular” – the words of the Red Bull team principal, reported by the German magazine Auto Motor und Sport. Based on the data from the last few races, Red Bull will have to respond in the straight and in the third sector, which in the past had put the 2019 Ferrari, the SF90, in great difficulty. Now the F1-75, however, has its strong point in the aerodynamic downforce, while the Red Bull has chosen the path of efficiency. We will see if the developments will once again overturn the premises of the eve in a championship in which every prediction, for now, has often been denied.