Despite early season woes Max Verstappen went on to dominate the 2022 season
The Dutchman, who retired twice in the first 3 races with fuel pump issues and was quoted as saying “I don’t even want to think about the Championship fight at the moment” won 15 out of 22 races and beat his nearest rival Charles Leclerc to the title by 146 points.
The Struggles
During the first few races of the year, when Ferrari looked to have the fastest car, Verstappen was struggling with a balance which was more understeery than he would have liked, due to the car being above the 798 kg weight limit (to the tune of around 15kg) and because of the unexpected handling issues of the new Pirelli 18- inch tyres in low speed corners.
The problem was felt mostly in Qualifying with low fuel, which allowed teammate Sergio Perez to get much closer to him than usual, as the now 2- time world champion had essentially a ceiling on his performance.
The Mexican managed to grab pole at Jeddah and out- qualified his teammate at Monaco before going onto win, and beat him to the front row at Baku. His average Qualifying deficit to Verstappen was just under a tenth of a second, however by the end of the year the deficit went up to over 0.3s.
Speaking in an exclusive interview with Motorsport.com about how the car balance affected his performance early in the season Verstappen said: “Well, now it was just related to the weight of the car.
“Being really overweight created an understeering balance and once we started to get rid of that, it started to be more agile again.
“Not just twitchy but more agile. You could really use the front end. At the end of the day, that’s also how you really drive a fast car.
“A car cannot be fast with understeer. It’s impossible.”
Red Bulls Resolution
As the season progressed Red Bull’s focus was on taking the weight out of the RB18 and distributing the ballast rearwards within the permitted limit, which allowed Verstappen to turn in earlier with less steering lock and get the desired rotation from the rear, in turn giving him the ability to drive the car much more to his liking, similar to the previous generation of ‘high rake’ Red Bulls.
Speaking in an interview with Mark Hughes for The Race Red Bull Chief Engineer Paul Monaghan spoke about how weight saving opened up the aero setup: “If you move the weight rearwards on the car you reduce the understeer so you can compensate by changing your aero demand to get better high- speed balance without hurting the low speed.
“We were reducing weight on the car and there was an initial target to find it from the front, but then it became front and rear because if you make a car lighter for a given situation you’ll be faster.
“It wasn’t as if we were only working on the front axle. The regulation range in weight distribution is only one percent – and a few kilograms off here or there isn’t even going to shift it the full one percent.
“Incrementally, it shifted rearwards a bit.”
However, adjusting the aero balance took Perez away from his personal sweet spot compared to Verstappen, and ultimately he fell much further back.
All Time Great
Verstappen’s performance at Spa, which saw him start 14th after taking pole the previous day due to an engine penalty, and then go onto win the race by nearly 18s was one that looked similar to a classic Schumacher drive during his dominant Ferrari years. Like man and machine in perfect harmony and a driver who is able to live with a pointy front end – giving him a naturally higher ceiling than a merely good driver, who will tend struggle more and prefers a more benign car setup – ie. Sergio Perez.
That’s what the great drivers are able to do given the right circumstances, and that’s what ultimately sets a driver like Verstappen out from the rest.