Autosport 4/28/2022

Red Bull’s Formula 1 fightback was always likely to come sooner rather than later, but it was unfortunate for Ferrari and its fans that the blue team’s first 1-2 for six years should arrive on Italian soil last weekend. As Matt Kew shows in our race report on page 14, Red Bull had a small but significant edge at Imola, while a few Ferrari slips – most notably Charles Leclerc’s first big error of the year – made it an emphatic success. Max Verstappen’s maximum haul of 34 points puts him where the performance has always been this year – up near the top of the table battling Leclerc. Ferrari now has to respond, which will be the true test of the team’s championship mettle. One thing Ferrari shouldn’t be criticised for…

FORMULA 1 Formula 1 is revisiting the push to expand to six sprint races next year through talks with teams in the wake of last Saturday’s event at the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix. F1 managing director Ross Brawn originally wanted to hold six events this season but, after a debate with the teams about the potential cost of damage within the constraints of the budget cap, it was agreed to stick with three sprints, as was the case when they debuted last year. Sprint races were on the agenda of this Tuesday’s meeting of the F1 Commission. “We’d like to have six races next year,” Brawn explained following the 21-lap sprint race at Imola last weekend. “I think [the teams] can see the success and I think we didn’t know quite where we…

FORMULA 1 Carlos Sainz will remain with Ferrari until the end of the 2024 Formula 1 season after agreeing a new two-year contract with the team. Sainz joined Ferrari in 2021 as Charles Leclerc’s team-mate, and has fitted in well at Maranello. He scored four podiums last year and a second-place finish in Bahrain at the start of this season. Ferrari opened talks with Sainz over the winter and swiftly sewed up a deal, having not considered any other options to partner Leclerc, and announced the deal ahead of last weekend’s race at Imola. Team principal Mattia Binotto said Sainz was the “obvious” driver to continue with, and confirmed it was a two-year deal running to the end of 2024. Sainz said talks had been “easy going” and that a “good plan” was put together…

FORMULA 1 Sebastian Vettel says his Formula 1 future with Aston Martin hinges on how he and the team respond to “the mountain ahead of us” in trying to improve the car. “It will depend on obviously how this year goes and then take it from there,” said Vettel. “The focus is on the now and on the mountain ahead of us that we try to climb, and we won’t climb it in a day, we won’t climb it in a month. “But we will choose the path that we climb, which will determine the next three to four years, so that’s why I feel it’s really important to focus on that and it takes all the attention.” Aston Martin team principal Mike Krack added that it would be “foolish” not to try to…

BTCC The British Touring Car Champi0nship’s new hybrid regulations have been hailed as a success following the inaugural round with the Cosworth-built system at Donington Park last weekend. The implementation of hybrid power has sounded the death knell for the unpopular ‘handicap’ system of success ballast. Instead, the leading drivers are given restrictions on usage of the hybrid, which gives a boost increase for 15 seconds per lap. Even with an increase in base weight of 70kg to allow for the weight of hybrid and battery, BMW driver Jake Hill smashed Gordon Shedden’s qualifying record by 0.576 seconds (set in 2021 with 15kg of success ballast on his Honda). Hill also set the new race lap record, 0.272s below the old mark set by Ash Sutton’s unballasted Infiniti in the 2020 season-opener. “I thought…

BTCC Teams using the British Touring Car Championship’s new TOCA customer engine were given a boost increase in time for qualifying for last weekend’s opening round at Donington Park. Cumbrian motorsport powerhouse M-Sport has replaced Swindon Powertrain for 2022-26 as supplier of the TOCA engine, which was used by 13 cars at Donington, and calls had been made during pre-season testing for concessions. This was granted in the form of an additional 40 millibars of boost after further evaluation by TOCA technical boffins, in the wake of allowing two cars the extra boost in free practice. “We were using them to generate new data,” explained series chief Alan Gow. “That validated what we thought and we issued a bulletin to increase the boost for qualifying.” Even with the boost increase, the highest-placed qualifier using…