In the round-up: Red Bull team principal Christian Horner says Ferrari’s reliability concerns are of no comfort to his team as they compete for this year’s world championship titles.
In brief
Ferrari’s reliability woes of no comfort to Red Bull in title fight
Carlos Sainz Jnr suffered the latest in a series of reliability failures for Ferrari in last week’s Austrian Grand Prix.Red Bull’s Max Verstappen currently leads the drivers’ championship by 38 points over Sainz’s team mate Charles Leclerc. Ferrari have suffered four mechanical retirements in the last six rounds.
But asked if Ferrari’s recent reliability concerns gave Red Bull cause for optimism in their championship, Horner said “not really.”
“We’re not too focussed on them and that,” Horner continued. “We can’t control or contribute to that in any way. I think that we’ve got to focus on ourselves and on just getting the best out of our own package.
Horner says Red Bull are conscious that Ferrari could have secured a one-two victory last weekend in Austria had Sainz not suffered a power unit failure. “They had a very strong car – they could have could have well finished first and second. Up until about lap 12, the weekend had gone pretty well in terms of the pole position and the sprint victory. But, unfortunately, that tyre deg just hit us pretty hard.”
New York crash ‘one of my strongest’ – Di Grassi
Lucas di Grassi labelled the race ending crash he was involved in at the end of the first New York EPrix as one of the biggest he had experienced in his motorsport career.
Di Grassi was running in second behind Nick Cassidy when rain began to fall with around ten minutes remaining in the race. Sudden high levels of standing water along the back straight caused Cassidy, Di Grassi and Stoffel Vandoorne to aquaplane off the track and into the turn six barriers, with Di Grassi’s Venturi hitting Cassidy’s Envision before both were struck by the Mercedes.
“The crash today was the strongest crash of my Formula E career,” said Di Grassi. “One of the strongest crashes I had in motorsport.
“It was well over 15G, I would say. I’m fully bruised – my neck, my hands, my legs – but I’m okay. It just shows that when you’re aquaplaning, there’s nothing really you can do. I’m happy that they put [out] the red flag and they reversed the result of the race, because it was the fairest thing to do. I’m happy with the points, but unhappy that the car is completely in pieces and the mechanics will have to work very, very hard to put the car together for tomorrow.”
IndyCar driver salaries “getting better” – Rahal
Graham Rahal says salaries for IndyCar drivers are “definitely getting better” after recent seasons where some drivers would not be paid more than expenses for competing in the series.
Controversy erupted over Alex Palou’s future this week with both Ganassi and McLaren claiming to have rights to his services for 2023. Rahal says that the driver market in IndyCar is becoming more financially competitive.
“I think the marketplace is definitely getting better,” said Rahal. “Driver salaries are increasing. Pretty much everybody’s salaries are increasing.
“I also think five, six, seven, eight years ago it was way too low. There were a bunch of guys in the series that weren’t even getting paid – basically their expenses to live and that’s it. I think that it was just kind of out of line.
“I think still as a series generally clearly we don’t play as many games as baseball or whatever. When you see some of the salaries that are announced in those major sports, you could literally fund multiple race cars for years off what some of these guys are making.”
Advert | Become a RaceFans supporter and
Social media
Notable posts from Twitter, Instagram and more:
Last week fifty girls had the trip of a lifetime!🙌
As part of our aim to create a positive impact within our community and to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion within motorsport, we were delighted to welcome fifty girls to the factory for a @GirlsOnTrackUK activity day! pic.twitter.com/DfWZha9TXV
— Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 Team (@MercedesAMGF1) July 16, 2022
Home GP prep 💪 Have a good weekend everybody 😎 pic.twitter.com/8kUm8rAlTW
— Esteban Ocon (@OconEsteban) July 16, 2022
@mclaren Our pit crew overalls explained! 😌 @sparco.official! #McLaren #F1 #LearnOnTikTok #Motorsport #FormulaOne #Sparco
Advert | Become a RaceFans supporter and
- Find more official F1 accounts to follow in the F1 Twitter Directory
Links
Motor racing links of interest:
Honda not closing door on F1 return as they watch 2026 engine discussions (Formula 1)
"It is not a closed door (to F1). My understanding is that F1 is discussing to decide the regulations for 2026, and definitely the direction is carbon neutrality. That is the same direction as us. It is probably also a good opportunity to study carbon neutrality to F1, so it’s not a closed door."
Sorry, Fernando! Alonso is wrong after his moans about F1's predictability (Mail)
"Zooming out to see the bigger picture, this is not just a two-horse race. This is the best of the best jostling and tussling around every corner and straight to triumph. This is a long slog of a season, where one mistake can lead to heartbreak. Yes, the end result may be predictable - but the journey getting there really is not."
Piquet facing court battle and eye-watering fine over Hamilton racist abuse (Mirror)
"A judge in Sao Paulo has ordered an investigation into his comments after a human rights group pressed charges against the former racer for causing moral damage to black and LGBTQ+ people. The charges include a claim for Piquet to pay around £1.5m in damages."
"The level is so high in Formula E that if you don’t perform at your 100% best, the team and myself, you don’t come away with any points at all. You have to absolutely nail it to finish top 10 in this championship. Wherever you finish in the race this year, that’s probably where you deserve to finish."
Does Romain Grosjean Like Lewis Hamilton? | Q&A (Romain Grosjean via YouTube)
"We're back with some new content that answers your questions, such as: do Romain Grosjean and Lewis Hamilton get along? Based on Google search queries, I have compiled a list of questions frequently asked about myself, Romain Grosjean."
Formula E round 11: New York (Formula E via YouTube)
We always endeavour to credit original sources. If you have a tip for a link relating to single-seater motorsport to feature in the next RaceFans round-up please send it in via the contact form.
Advert | Become a RaceFans supporter and
Comment of the day
With Kevin Magnussen praising Haas team mate Mick Schumacher for making “big steps” in his last two points finishes for the team, reader Kpcart notices a pattern recurring in Schumacher’s single-seater career…
It took a long time for Mick to get going in F1, he has had around 30 races before hitting the mark, a lot longer than many other drivers ever got. But going by his F3 and F2 form, once he hits the mark he stays at that level, so he might actually be a very capable F1 driver now. Magnussen has done great this year.
Kpcart
Happy birthday!
Happy birthday to Bradley13 and David Hoops!
On this day in motorsport
- 40 years ago today Keke Rosberg scored the only pole position of his world championship-winning season, at Brands Hatch
S
17th July 2022, 11:10
So it’s only half disappointing, then?
This is the way F1 usually is though… Most years’ champions are set in stone by the end of the first week of pre-season testing. All we can hope for is as much unpredictability along the way as possible to make it at least a little bit interesting.
Bring on the ‘gimmicks’ – the ‘best’ teams and drivers will still be the ‘best’ anyway – we’ll all just get to enjoy it a bit more.
PeterG
17th July 2022, 11:52
Apart from the vast majority of F1 fans (According to every poll/survey ever conducted by anyone anywhere) who don’t like gimmicks.
You want a gimmick ridden series thats all show and no sport then go watch nascar or one of the other lower categories that use them. If you don’t like F1 as a more pure sport which it has always been then maybe it’s just not for you & you should go watch one of the gimmick ridden show over sport things that aren’t as popular because virtually nobody wants a gimmick ridden series that puts show over sport.
It’s bad enough that we already have artificial gimmicks like DRS, Rubbish tires & these horrid sprint qualifying races. Adding more would just tilt the balance ever more towards been a show rather than a sport & that would likely start to turn people off, Just as has happened in other categories that started heading down that route.
None are or ever will be as popular as F1 because the gimmicks are a turn off to a majority of fans of the sport.
Then you end up where nascar is. You have driven away the actual race fans who like the sport and the younger & more casual audience your show gimmicks brought in don’t stick around long term leaving you with a smaller audience.
Sensord4notbeingafanboi (@peartree)
17th July 2022, 11:57
He is being sarcastic, of course Alonso is right, the new formula is better but it relies on the same non racing gimmicks, DRS and bad rules such as limitations to tyre and fuel strategy that frankly do the opposite of the intended objective which is improve racing, that said the rules I’m mentioning were passed by the top teams as they want predictability, they want the best car to win without the risk real racing implies.
S
17th July 2022, 13:19
Spoken like someone who:
A) Doesn’t watch NASCAR. And certainly doesn’t appreciate the finer points of it. And,
B) Has a very emotional attachment to F1 of the past. Looking at it objectively, modern F1 is one of, if not *the* most ‘gimmick’ laden racing series I can think of. Seriously.
Comparing popularity to other series is apples and oranges. Find me another series in the world that even tries to reach as many people as F1. Everything else is regional, domestic, or deliberately limited in scale by design.
When you do, we’ll compare.
And polls on F1 fansites? All they tell you is what people who frequent F1 fansites want.
How many NASCAR fansites do you visit so you can take polls there? If you don’t go there to tell them what you want to see, how will they know?
The largest F1 polls attract a few 10’s of thousands of respondents at best. Most are far less (this site usually has a few hundred at most). F1’s global audience is made up of more than 100m people at times (but not always)…..
That’s a very small percentage of the total, wouldn’t you agree? Bit hard to draw meaningful conclusions from that, right?
PeterG
17th July 2022, 16:26
I used to watch nascar but stopped watching it when they started piling on alot of the more gimmikey things.
I pop in to see whats going on from time to time but what it is now just doesn’t interest me and all you need to do is look at there decline and current tv figures and circuit attendance to see that i wasn’t alone in leaving when the gimmicks started flooding in. They lost more than 50% of there audience i believe i saw at one point.
I do also pop in to nascar fan communities sometimes to see what people think of rule changes and such as i try to keep up with whats going on in most of the larger categories and it seems like even most of those who are still watching don’t really like most of the gimmicks brought in the past 20-25 years.
And yes the f1 surveys don’t take the views of every fan but they take the views of enough with results been mostly consistent enough across the various platforms, sites and such that I’d say its a good indicator.
Thats how these things work and the f1 global one done last year of what 250,000 fans or something is a very significant pool of people when to comes to polling. I don’t even think most of the political polls get that large a pool of people.
S
18th July 2022, 6:51
I guess you’ve got a choice to make, then. Go with the flow, suck it up and enjoy the ride – or quit.
Same goes for NASCAR and for F1. They are both changing, because the world is.
Sensord4notbeingafanboi (@peartree)
17th July 2022, 11:52
Cotd. If you consider Mick needed 1.5 seasons to get going, (I still think that is up to debate, rule change is a factor and perhaps mick is bot there yet) that is definitely not a lot longer than most drivers have gotten a chance. Most rookies get more than a season. Some drivers do not beat their team mates or drive against unproven drivers yet they are still here and praised.
I mean Button got 10 seasons before he showed some level of competitiveness, Carlos is barely an okay driver and it has been 7 seasons, Gasly is another bad driver that has had a lot of seasons, Tsunoda is up against Gasly who has never shown anything. Magnussen is not a benchmark either, he was just a tad quicker than Button but he got beaten by him anyway, his other significant team mate was the dodgy Romain who was not the greatest benchmark either.
Not to mention Latify and Stroll.
Davethechicken
17th July 2022, 11:55
Carlos was every bit the match of Max at Torro Rosso, he is better than OK.
Jere (@jerejj)
17th July 2022, 14:11
The rain-soaked NYC ePrix gives 2007 Nurburgring vibes.
Honda should just stay away unless they’d remain committed for the long-term.
Pointless to return & leave back-&-forth.
Mail article couldn’t be more spot-on.
COTD: Indeed.
Steve (@duuxdeluxe)
17th July 2022, 18:33
Where Red Bull’s reliability problems seem to have been around bit other than the engine (parts) itself (fuel pump etc), Ferrari has some serious problems with the unit itself. The fire coming from Sainz’ car and the bits blowing out of the exaust surely mean that’s a full engine down the drain, which would result in grid penalties.
Now I am sure that Ferrari will be allowed to fix the issue (I do believe the rules allow for that), but I do wonder whether Ferrari can actually identify and fix the problem in time. And even if they do: we’re only halfway through the season, so surely that will be at least 2 full new engine by the time we hit Abu Dhabi…
Tim (@tungdil12)
17th July 2022, 20:08
What if ferrari built their engine like this on purpose? On the limit, or a little bit over. They cant develop the engine for performance but are allowed to upgrade it for “reliability” i think. Maybe they didnt expect their car to be that good in comparison to mercedes and red bull and did it thinking of 2023 and 2024?
Steve (@duuxdeluxe)
18th July 2022, 5:34
Well yeah, but doesn’t every team do this? One could simply claim that when changing the spec of a certain part to an improved one allows them to make more miles on the block (albeit in a higher engine mode) thus claim ‘improved reliability’.
Sure, you can’t put a bigger turbo on it and claim it’s for reliability, but I feel that most improvements get put under reliability anyway. Which is technically allowed, but does make one wonder how ‘frozen’ the engine reqs really are. To me, frozen means that if you messed up, you’re going to pay the price for it till it gets unfrozen. Which would result in a lot of Ferrari-engines blowing up, but at least they’d stay true to the intent of the rules.
Then again, the FIA and interpretation of the intent of the rules is a rather funny combo….
Qeki (@qeki)
17th July 2022, 20:47
I don’t get japanese. They speak about being loyal and respecting to others and then they float on shallow water between the line of staying and leaving..
Qeki (@qeki)
17th July 2022, 20:47
or should I say I don’t get what Honda is doing
Bullfrog (@bullfrog)
18th July 2022, 23:31
When’s the activity day for 25 girls and 25 boys, then?
Ah, wait – that doesn’t say equality, that says equity… Brilliant – F1’s so obsessed with money, it can’t even keep it out of a worthy tweet.