It is a truism of sport that the points table never lies – or does it? The 2022 F1 season was one of those occasions when we may beg to differ...
Ranking Formula 1’s ten teams on 2022 season: Red Bull, Ferrari and more comparedIt is a truism of sport that the points table never lies – or does it? The 2022 Formula 1 season was one of those occasions when we may beg to differ.
As for Yuki Tsunoda? Many drivers have been dropped by Red Bull for less than what he did in 2022, driving straight into the wall at the pit exit in Canada and colliding with his team-mate at Silverstone, leaving behind the debris that wrecked Verstappen’s race. Williams at least finally brought the bottom up by moving on Nicholas Latifi, but having previously been linked to De Vries and Oscar Piastri they have settled on promoting Logan Sargeant.
It all finally started to make sense after Vettel announced his retirement in Hungary, with the four-time World Champion scoring points in six of the last 10 races of his career to haul Aston from second-bottom to within touching distance of sixth. Alpine, he claimed at one stage, must have done “pretty bad job” to leave McLaren in with a shot of finishing fourth in the Championship.
Their struggles following the arrival of the B-spec car were potentially a reflection of Haas’s unique structure, F1’s smallest team lacking the manpower and agility to optimise a major upgrade package. The catastrophic collapse of Ferrari’s season after a near-perfect start, with Charles Leclerc leading Max Verstappen by 46 points after three races, has been well documented.
Yet having already scapegoated the team principal and lost one of the most talented and innovative engineers in F1 in the process, now is the time for some perspective.For a team who targeted this year’s rule changes from the moment they rejoined the grid in 2016, Alpine’s failure to make a serious breakthrough in 2022 was a function of the disorganisation and mismanagement that characterised the Renault years.
It was almost chronically unreliable as Alonso and Esteban Ocon suffered a combined seven mid-race technical failures – as well as costly problems in Australia qualifying and the Austria sprint – making Alpine’s fight with McLaren more anxious than it ought to have been. Central to that solid start was Valtteri Bottas – looking, if anything, a little too happy to be no longer driving a race-winning Mercedes – who scored points in all but two of the opening nine races to set the foundation for the team’s best Championship placing in a decade.
“The team did a great job on all three to ensure we were in the mix and ready to take advantage of any opportunity that came our way.”
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