This weekend the Spanish Grand Prix is staged, the sixth round of the 2022 Formula 1 World Championship and first, a great opportunity for the teams to bring the first substantial packages of news after a start to the season that took place almost entirely outside the Europe.
Already many teams – in an open, or only veiled way – have made it known that they will bring important news to Barcelona. Just think of Aston Martin, which has rethought the sides of the hitherto disappointing AMR22s, but also of Ferrari, called to recover ground against the Red Bulls, which appeared stronger two weeks ago at the Miami Grand Prix.
But that’s not all, because Mercedes will continue to work on the “zero belly” project of the W13. Barcelona will be the last bastion of the season to understand if the project can be developed in the forms in which we know it now or if, instead, it will have to be the subject of a total rethinking, abandoning the path undertaken starting from the second pre-season test carried out in Sakhir, Bahrain, in early March.
Among the teams, however, there is a voice out of the chorus. Haas F1, in fact, has made it known through the words of its team principal Guenther Steiner that it will not bring updates to the Circuit de Catalunya-Barcelona. The goal is to maximize the potential of the current package and then introduce new features later on.
“Usually the Spanish GP is the most obvious event and place to bring updates and I think many teams have planned them for that event. I don’t know how much difference they will make on each car and I don’t know what the other teams will bring.” , said the South Tyrolean manager.
“We decided to wait a little longer to bring the updates, because I think that even without them we can extrapolate good performance from the car. Sometimes we did it, other times we didn’t.”
“We have a good package of updates for about four or five races, so I’m confident about that. I don’t know what the other teams will bring, at the moment I don’t know. But we will certainly know much better next Monday after the race.”
Montmelò hosted the first 2022 Formula 1 pre-season test session. For the teams, the advantage will be that they already have some references that could prove to be good in preparing the set-up of the cars for Sunday’s race.
“Although the team has already ridden in Spain this year it does not mean that it is an advantage over the other teams, also because the other teams have also ridden with us in the tests”, continued Steiner.
“We know Montmelò very well. It is important for us to arrive there and to know that we already had a good set up in the tests. We arrive in Spain with confidence. When we start off on the right foot, we usually put ourselves in a good position for qualifying and for the race. Let’s hope it happens again this time. “
