![]() His teammate George Rusell got his debut win and beat him in the championship last year, proving that he is likely to give Hamilton a fight, rather than succumbing to secondary-driver status. Seven-times champion Hamilton will lead the charge for Mercedes after having endured the worst season – and the only winless one – of his career last year. Especially given the fact that the teams were only given three days ahead of a 23-race season, the longest in the sport’s history.īut even the most optimistic fans cannot deny that Red Bull and Verstappen are looking ominous for the chasing pack, made up exclusively of Ferrari and Mercedes, who, with Red Bull, held all but one podium place throughout last year despite new regulations and a cost-budget limit that, while improving overtaking and wheel-to-wheel racing, failed to make things more competitive at the top. They managed to do it brilliantly, but seem to have perfected it ahead of this season. They needed to shed weight, without causing too much understeer which Verstappen famously loathes. What is preventing women drivers from reaching Formula 1? Make sure your voice is heard on this important topic by taking part in the More than Equal fan attitude survey.If the Dutchman is to win the first race of the season in Bahrain on Sunday, he would have led the championship for 18 successive races – a landmark achievement that seems on the cards as Red Bull look to have refined what was already an aggressively efficient piece of machinery in pre-season testing.Īfter a tough start to last season, the challenge for Red Bull was weight distribution. ![]() ![]() “ trying to learn the tyres, trying to really understand how we can preserve them better, which hasn’t been the easiest for sure.” When asked how he had adapted to work around the understeer issues – Verstappen would win six races in the season’s first half before the lightened RB18 really allowed him to produce his best from the summer onwards – he replied: “To be honest, most of it came from the weight. “Especially with the tyres we had this year being a bit more understeer limited as well. At the end of the day, that’s also how you really drive a fast car. “Being really overweight created an understeering balance and once we started to get rid of that, it started to be more agile again. “Well, now it was just related to the weight of the car,” he said. Speaking to in an exclusive interview, Verstappen explained how his driving style fitted in along with the requirements of the new ground-effects machines, with the understeer issue felt most when running on near-empty tanks in qualifying. The combined problems left Verstappen unable to have the extremely pointy and nimble front end he prefers until Red Bull was able to get the RB18 under the weight limit and could apply ballast to load up the front axle and create Verstappen’s wilder, oversteer-happy approach. This centred on the car being above the 798kg minimum weight limit at the start of the campaign, which added understeer to a package where that was already being felt due to the unexpected handling issues from Pirelli’s 2022 front tyres – newly constructed for the switch to 18-inch wheel rims – in the slow-speed corners where ground-effects cars do not perform at their best. While Verstappen’s Red Bull squad also had early-season retirements due its fuel pump issues, which meant the Dutchman retired from the Bahrain and Australia races Leclerc won, he also lost qualifying positions (including pole in Jeddah) to team-mate Sergio Perez as the RB18 at that time did not suit his driving style. ![]() Max Verstappen has further outlined his early frustrations with the handling of Red Bull’s 2022 Formula 1 challenger, saying “a car cannot be fast with understeer”.Īlthough Verstappen went on to claim the 2022 title with four races to spare and with a total of 15 victories, his title rival Charles Leclerc won two of the opening three events for Ferrari and might have won more in the first phase of the year but for his team’s issues with strategy and unreliability. ![]()
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