Manama: The 2022 Formula One season is about more than just the renewed battle between reigning champion Max Verstappen and the man he dethroned, Lewis Hamilton.
It will be a heavily revised version of F1’s high-speed soap opera, featuring new race management, all-new cars designed to create closer racing, and a reshuffled cast that will launch into the unknown at this weekend’s season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix.
Fourteen weeks after the sour, contrived, and controversial last-lap drama in Abu Dhabi that ended Hamilton’s four-year reign as champion and ushered Verstappen to a first title crown, the curtain rises on a ‘revolutionary’ new show featuring the most sweeping technical rule changes in 40 years.
The return of ‘ground effect’ aerodynamics for the first time since 1983 with much bigger wheels and fatter tires, a freeze on power unit development, and a tighter budget cap, down to 140 million dollars (127.4 million euros) excluding drivers’ salaries, may throw up arguments and shocks.
However, below the surface, away from the gleaming visible alterations and the uncertainties brought by the Covid-19 pandemic, mounting inflation, and a European war, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the human drama will remain unchanged — at least for now.
– Wounded Hamilton returns –
Bitterly disillusioned, but now repaired, Hamilton, 37, returns from a hermetic off-season to resume his quest for a record eighth title 750 kilometers up the coast from the Yas Marina Circuit where his hopes of winning last season’s title battle with Verstappen were dashed.
As Hamilton’s Mercedes team and Red Bull swapped heated claims and counter-claims, the architect of F1’s greatest furor, Race Director Michael Masi, was muzzled and later removed from his role by the International Motoring Federation (FIA), which itself underwent an upheaval.
Masi had delivered an improvised interpretation of the rules to avoid the race ending behind a safety car. That handed Verstappen, on new tires, a clear advantage for the last-lap showdown and not only gifted him the title, but “tarnished the image of F1”, according to the FIA.
Within days, the FIA had a new president in Dubai-born Mohammed Ben Sulayem, who promised a review that came with a restructuring of race direction under two men, German Niels Wittich and Eduardo Freitas from Portugal, aided by the return from retirement of the vastly experienced Briton Herbie Blash as a permanent advisor.