Photo by: Carl Bingham / Motorsport Images Vettel suffered an engine failure and two races across his return to F1 action after his COVID-19 absence If Vettel names his car after another Bond Girl, it should be 'Jinx' Much to the delight of the cheering Williams garage.ħ. Then when he made his very late visit to the pits, Leclerc was lapping and therefore delaying the cars Albon was battling for position to allow him to hang on for a points finish. Having deviated from the main tactic by starting on hard tyres, logic might therefore have dictated that Albon stopped around lap 39 when the VSC was called for Verstappen retiring.īut he instead ploughed on until the end of the penultimate lap, keep the aging rubber alive and in a temperature sweet spot to keep competitive and not have to take advantage of the shortened stops.
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But he recovered to 10th at the flag by defying conventional wisdom.Ī pitstop under a virtual or full safety car was calculated to be around 12s in Australia, 8s quicker than stopping in normal race conditions. The Thai-Brit qualified 16th but started last following his three-place grid penalty for causing a collision with Lance Stroll in Saudi Arabia and for failing to provide a fuel sample, which meant he was chucked out of the qualifying results. Williams scored its first point of the season thanks to Albon and the team's strategists working in tandem to execute a deft late pitstop call after nursing hard tyres for 57 of the 58 laps.
Albon and Williams defied safety car pitstop logic for a popular pointĪlbon completed 57 laps on his hard tyres to charge from last to 10th Fernando Alonso might have landed provisional pole before the hydraulics problem that induced his crash in qualifying on a weekend when Alpine jumped ahead of Mercedes in the supertimes.īy contrast, the Haas duo of Kevin Magnussen and Mick Schumacher were never a threat for Q3 or points despite the American team's impressive start to the new campaign.Īlbert Park was heavily updated for this year and the venue has never been a crystal-clear form guide in seasons gone by, but the change in pecking order last weekend hopefully previews the competitive swing that might occur from one track to the next as different layouts and surfaces come to suit different teams.Ħ. The knock-on effect of the variation appears to be that everyone behind Ferrari and Red Bull is still yet to establish where they sit in the competitive order.įifth and sixth for McLaren marked a significant leap forward after its toils in Bahrain and Saudi that were a long way adrift of the hype it created in pre-season testing.
One team's take on the optimum ground-effect solution is very different to the next. Part of the success of the regulatory overhaul for 2022 has been the reintroduction of design differentiation into F1. Norris and Ricciardo gave McLaren a timely boost but conceded gains were largely track-specific McLaren has made gains in a very unsettled midfield But the headline results do not cover up that Russell was outqualified by Norris and he benefitted heavily from the second safety car before ceding to Perez to finish 26s adrift of winner Leclerc.ĥ. Russell was able to pick up a podium and despite battling overheating, Hamilton came home fourth after pulling away from Lando Norris and Daniel Ricciardo in another weekend of effective damage limitation. What's more, those numbers place its on-paper speed behind McLaren and Alpine.
That has now increased further to 1.229s last weekend in Australia. It had a deficit of 0.541s in Bahrain and 1.025s in Saudi. The super times suggest Mercedes is falling further behind Ferrari and Red Bull. But the potential in the machinery still remains only theoretical after the display from the Silver Arrows in Melbourne. The more recent declaration, however, is that when the W13 car is unlocked, Mercedes will be back at the sharp end. But it appears as though the eight-time constructors' champion was on the money with its regression in 2022. Mercedes is no closer to taking the fight to Red Bull and Ferrariĭespite Russell's podium finish Mercedes remain way off the pace of Ferrari and Red BullĪ lot of onlookers, both in and out of the paddock, weren't buying it in pre-season testing when Mercedes was hurriedly playing down expectations. And like his hard-tyre chagrin last time out, again the RB18 struggled to excite the Pirelli tyres as the Dutch ace faced graining in both stints before the ultimate unreliability.
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