THE DRIVING FORCE THAT WILL YIELD FERRARI’S NEXT TITLE
The 2022 Formula 1 season is nearly here. Pushed back a year by the COVID-19 pandemic, the championship’s new era is about to begin. For the teams that have looked on enviously as Mercedes and now Red Bull have tasted title success, it’s long been earmarked as the moment when they might just have their chance to vault up the competitive order.
For Ferrari, the wait since its last title now runs to 14 years – its 2008 constructors’ success, with a further year tacked on for its most recent drivers’ crown (Kimi Raikkonen’s shock triumph against McLaren racers Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton).
As you’re probably sick of hearing, no one knows exactly how the various interpretations of the new regulations up and down the F1 field are going to perform – wait for testing, then wait for qualifying in Bahrain, as the soundbites will go. But Ferrari has got one element required for sustained success sorted already. And it knows it.
“They are pushing each other,” Ferrari racing director Laurent Mekies says of the team’s driver pairing, Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz Jr. “We are comfortable with that. We think that for us, the big picture is the way our drivers are pushing each other, the way they interact with each other, the way they interact with the team, the way they are part of the development of the car with the simulator. These guys go back between the races in Maranello to put themselves in a black box. We think it’s a competitive advantage.”
The Leclerc/Sainz partnership is just a year old but, by the end of 2021, they had cemented what many suspected at the beginning of that campaign: that Ferrari’s driver line-up was the most formidable on last season’s grid. At
