British Formula One pit-lane reporter who works on Sky Sports F1 Ted Kravitz believes that the first pre-season testing session ahead of the 2022 Formula 1 championship, which took place at the Circuit de Catalunya in Barcelona proved that Scuderia Ferrari have enough pace to have “worried” Mercedes and Red Bull.
The Maranello team impressed a lot of people in the F1 paddock by showing consistent pace and also reliability during the first three days of testing in Barcelona and was able to complete more laps than any other team, which should represent an encouraging factor for the Italian side ahead of the next season.
At the same time, Scuderia Ferrari boss Mattia Binotto prefers not to create false hopes especially given the performance in the last few years and explained that Ferrari was “still the outsider” when it comes to potentially challenging for the 2022 Formula 1 world championship.
George Russell admitted his concerns about Mercedes’ speed too, believing his team is not ahead of Ferrari and McLaren based on the data seen in the first testing session. However, there are still three days of running at the Bahrain International Circuit ahead of the first round of the new campaign.
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As always, it is very difficult to accurately predict the true pace and performance of the teams given the several unknown factors such as fuel loads, power unit settings, different setups and other ‘sandbagging’ measures, but Sky Sports’ Ted Kravitz feels the Maranello team is in a good position at this stage of the pre-season period, with Red Bull being the only slight unknown as it stands.
“That’s a very good question,” he said on Sky Sports when asked his thoughts on an early top three after running had finished in Spain – “Because today was the day where the top two of last year showed what they had in the bag and, actually, it was Max Verstappen at Red Bull with the most impressive lap on a harder tyre – not as quick as the Mercedes, but certainly on a harder, supposedly slower tyre, he was there or thereabouts. It was a 1-2 at the end of the day for Mercedes, Lewis Hamilton and George Russell topping the timesheets, but really I think the test still belongs probably to Ferrari. They have shown enough in the first two days to have Mercedes worried; the only question is what have Red Bull got, and we learned a bit of that today.” – the Sky Sports F1 reported concluded.
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