F1 2022 thread - see post 1 for rules

Nice to see some love for bottas. Balances out some of the abuse he got over the last few years. He was never as bad as the posters made him out to be. He was just a massive disappointment as he was the only driver who could possibly challenge Hamilton's dominance but he wasn't fast or consistent enough to mount any kind of serious challenge. And that was frustrating.

Either way, nice to see him getting some appreciation in these threads.

Bottas has always been great on Saturdays over a lap. He's always been terrible in a race, especially when he needs to move through the field.

Was his heart really in the fight at Mercedes though? He knew even if he managed to get ahead James would be on the radio putting a leash on him so what was the point? Some of his radio conversations from last season were so depressing. He was always playing second fiddle and racing more for Lewis than himself in a lot of races. Now he's the top dog at Alfa with a rookie team mate and a car that, initially at least, looks decent so maybe we'll see a bit more fight from. It'll be disappointing if he drops straight out of the points.

The Alfa livery is great. Reminds me of the incredible Grand Prix cars they were building a hundred years ago.

The tyre deg must have come as a surprise here? Were perelli not predicting before the season started most races would be one stop? Then suddenly its a 3 stopper on the hardest compound? Granted the safety car made a lot of teams pit but didn't red bull and merc opt for a three stopper?

Yeah nobody was predicting a three stopper before the race and people had been saying Pirelli were conservative. As the above poster mentioned, heavier cars and an abrasive track mean lots of tyre wear, but the cars will be heavy everywhere and the track surface was a known quantity, so you'd expect the rubber to have been sufficiently durable to deal with it.

3 stop races are no bad thing in my opinion, they allow for a wider range of strategy. As long as drivers can push in between their stops and everyone isn't tiptoeing around. I get the impression the teams don't fully understand the tyres yet and are still feeling their way around at the moment. There were such a huge amount of changes this year to get on top of with so little testing time.

Looks increasingly like their promising pace in Barcelona was an attempt to do some glory runs and lure in sponsors. Getting google on board as a sponsor is surely good news going forward though.

If all else fails to could revert to some of their tried and tested strategies from last time they won a championship 😆

For F1 Sake (FF1S) is a good comedy podcast but has good news without trying to be about breaking news or having an inside scoop. They're just a funny take on the events ans pretty well informed.

Wtf1 podcast isn't too serious. I'd imagine the hosts are very marmite though (either you'll enjoy or hate).

I wonder, if the Mercedes-Benz PU is a bit of a dog will Williams try to use Albons contract to secure HRC units from Red Bull for 2023

Ya, but it homoglates this year, so if it's a dud it'll be still a dud for the next couple of seasons, right?

Also - I think Williams have a technical partnership with Mercedes, so that won't change...

Same could be said for the power train units if their reliability isn't good this year.

They had a fuel pump failure, which has nothing to do with the reliability of the power unit. I'm sure they'll find a way to mitigate for it in the next race. A couple of failures after 99% of a race distance and after near perfect reliability through multiple race distances during testing is unlikely to be as indicative of a big a problem as the bottom six all being on the same power unit.