Palmer points out where Red Bull won over 'faster Ferrari' in 2022

F1 News

25 November 2022 at 20:37

GPblog.com

Red Bull Racing won the constructors' championship again after an eight-year drought and also took the drivers' title in 2022 with Max Verstappen for the second year in a row. Former F1 driver Jolyon Palmer puts the statistics side by side and points out why Red Bull won from the faster Ferrari.

Ferrari faster on Saturday

In the video from F1, in which he analyses the 2022 season, Palmer uses five different graphs and finally mentions a sixth yardstick to show how Red Bull Racing won over Ferrari in 2022. The first measure of his analysis of the season are the qualifying sessions, in which Charles Leclerc was fastest and where Carlos Sainz also competed well in third place. Palmer wonders why Red Bull then still won so overwhelmingly from the faster Ferrari.

The answer is not very surprising, but the big difference was made by Verstappen. Indeed, Palmer's second measure is race pace. Palmer: "Verstappen was extremely good on race pace. Ferrari started strong in the first races but slipped away. It seemed like Verstappen had found a new level. Not only in terms of his pace, but also how he kept his tyres working. That was really a key element."

Mistakes Verstappen not punished

Thirdly, Palmer looks at the DNFs among teams that were caused by driver errors. In this, Verstappen tops the list along with Esteban Ocon. Not once did the drivers drop out due to their own actions or any other incident on the track. Verstappen was just not perfect and sometimes got off with a scare. Remember his spin in Hungary. For Leclerc, only the DNF in France came from an on-track incident. In Imola and in Brazil, the Monegasque was able to continue his way. Hamilton was also able to continue as normal after a hard collision with the wall in Singapore. According to Palmer, this mainly shows that the 2022 cars have become very strong.

Red Bull wins 4-1 over Ferrari

Fourth, Palmer names the durability and reliability of the cars. Red Bull and Ferrari finish on the same level in that chart. Both drivers of both teams recorded two DNFs due to reliability problems. So there, the two teams scored equally, but, fifth, in the pit lane during pit stops, Red Bull was the clear winner.

Palmer has no chart on the efficiency of strategy among the teams, but dares to say that Ferrari missed out on the bulk of the points to be gained there. Ferrari thus comes out stronger than Red Bull in only one measure (qualifying). In terms of reliability, the teams score evenly across the season, but the other four gauges speak in Red Bull's favour, and Verstappen contributed the most to the key gauges.