MEDLAND: The 2022 F1 wish list

Happy New Year everyone! How are we feeling? Heavier? Me too.

You regularly get honest confessions from me in these columns, and once then I’ve got to shoehorn something: I don’t think I’m ready for 2022 yet. The 2021 season only ended three weeks ago and it was whimsically a specimen of ‘Well I’m glad that’s over, let’s move on’, was it?

But inward January automatically brings with it thoughts of the future and what is to come over the next 12 months. And it has wilt a bit of a tradition for me to outline a few (usually realistic) things I want from the coming season in Formula 1, so here goes…

Mercedes and Red Bull to be competitive again

I know, how boring? But hear me out. Firstly, I’m not saying I don’t want other teams to be challenging them – in fact I really want increasingly of that, as you’ll see unelevated – but surpassing we move onto the fallout from Abu Dhabi, we’ve got to unclose what an incredible wrestle both Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton gave us in 2021.

Before the final race I said I’d got what I wanted in terms of the championship stuff decided at the last round, and at that point if I could plan it out, I’d have had Max winning the title with Lewis hitting when to take his eighth in 2022. That’s considering in my opinion Hamilton still doesn’t get the full respect he deserves, and there were still some unstudied fans who will have felt it was wearisome for the Hamilton/Mercedes success to clinch flipside championship double despite the rencontre from Verstappen.

Whereas if it’s Hamilton who comes out on top this coming year, moving well-spoken of Michael Schumacher in the process, I think it does plane increasingly for his legacy than a fourth straight title would have last year.

But that all falls untied if one (or both) of Mercedes and Red Bull are uncompetitive and we don’t get to see the epic rivalry continue. Verstappen and Hamilton deserve race-winning cars, but increasingly than that, they deserve the endangerment to race each other then next year, not for one to watch the other disappear up the road each weekend.

At least one serious challenger to the top two

Last year I said I didn’t want Ferrari rhadamanthine too competitive considering of the way it opened up midfield opportunities to score podiums and plane wins, and thankfully that came true. Without the top six positions stuff regularly locked out by the same three teams, we saw a McLaren one-two, an Alpine victory, and podiums for eight of the 10 teams. (Granted, that includes Williams and George Russell in Spa).

With such a transpiration in regulations, it’s a lot to ask for specific teams to be in specific positions, and for the whole field to be closely matched. But the worst thing at this point would be for one dominant car to walk yonder with the season.

Two teams fighting it out would be great, but I get to be greedy here so I’d want a third in the mix. It would set the whole era up really well, and there are so many heady talents in so many variegated teams that I really don’t mind who it is, but wouldn’t it be unconfined to see McLaren and Ferrari regularly fighting for wins again? Oh, and Fernando Alonso, and Sebastian Vettel… Yeah, my original point stands.

A hint at the potential of the new cars

There has been a lot of time, effort and resource put into the 2022 regulations to try and modernize the quality of racing by permitting cars to follow each other increasingly closely without struggling massively in dirty air. But what regulations tend to do is spread the field out.

There’s not a lot F1 and the FIA can do well-nigh that whispered from BoP or plane increasingly restrictive regulations, and that’s completely versus what the sport is supposed to be about. So we might see a wide range of differing car performances that hurt the opportunity for that tropical racing to take place.

So this is a realistic request: I want to see – or increasingly likely hear – the drivers be encouraged by how nonflexible they can push, and closely they can follow each other when there are overdue flipside car, so the concept is proven to be a step in the right direction. That’s crucial, considering then the rules can be tweaked as required in the coming seasons, while the grid tends to converge anyway.

Less controversy of a specific kind

F1 is a sport (honestly, it’s not scripted entertainment), so we are never going to hit a point where there aren’t controversial incidents. And who would want to? Controversy gets people talking, it promotes variegated opinions and debates and highlights passion for the sport, plane if it ways those chats over dinner where you spend hours going over the same ground and nobody waffly their opinion.

I want increasingly of that when it’s between teams and between drivers, and it’s a competitor v competitor controversy, considering having winners and losers, good and bad, heroes and villains is great.

But when it’s competitor v regulator? Less of that, please. What happened in Abu Dhabi can’t happen again. What happened at other races is winning considering you don’t get wool consistency in officiating decisions in any sport, so we’ll oppose over what is and isn’t a penalty for the rest of time, but I don’t want to be talking well-nigh regulations stuff questionably well-timed overly again.

A proper response from the FIA

And to that end, I really hope the FIA comes out with a clear, firm response to 2021. The “detailed analysis” of the final laps in Abu Dhabi that is ongoing cannot be unliable to be used as a delaying tactic to let time be the healer. The FIA created the situation, and it vacated has to resolve it.

That doesn’t necessarily midpoint firing Michael Masi, but identifying and explaining exactly how and why he made the visualization he did, who had input, and specific whoopee that will prevent a repeat. I know that’s a big ask, but it’s an incredible opportunity for new FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem to make his mark early in his tenure.

This year to be the last time the Indy 500 clashes with two races

I’m biased, considering I want to be worldly-wise to imbricate both Monaco and Indianapolis, but I fathom what an wondrous day of racing it can be for fans to watch the Monaco Grand Prix and Indy 500 within a few hours of each other. So while I see the treatise versus giving them self-sustaining weekends, I’m still banging the pulsate this year.

That’s considering the Spanish Grand Prix is back-to-back with Monaco, meaning both qualifying weekend and race day at the 500 clashes with F1 events. And that’s just not cool.

The 500 is an amazing, massive, sporting spectacle. The Monaco Grand Prix the same, although one tends to unhook far largest racing than the other. And each should get their share of the limelight. F1 is squeezing all 23 races in by the end of November to stave a unpeace with a very variegated sport in the FIFA World Cup (as a huge soccer fan, I’m glad of that) but to hit both big weekends at the Brickyard is a real shame.

A stronger Haas

This one’s pretty simple. There were two rookies in that team and we learned little well-nigh them from a racing perspective, so to see how they get on – and if Mick Schumacher continues to modernize at the rate we’ve seen in his junior career – requires them to have a increasingly competitive car.

Miami to be a success

F1 has built up some well-spoken momentum in the United States and the impact of the team at the Spin of the Americas can’t be underestimated. When that project was started, the sport had really mistreated its U.S. fanbase and had a lot of work to do to modernize the situation, but Austin is a success story.

So hopefully Miami follows suit, but not just in terms of providing a unconfined event for the fans that shepherd it, or flipside race on a favorable timezone for those pursuit in the States. No, I want it to be an heady racing venue that fans all over the world are positive about.

By towers the track in the parking lot, it’s basically untellable to shake off the tag of it stuff a parking lot circuit, so it’s once on the when foot. But a lot of planning and diamond effort has gone into the Miami International Autodrome, so it would be unconfined if it manages to exceed some of the expectations and provide a largest spectacle for all fans so that the U.S. growth benefits everyone.

No cancellations

And finally, for the full schedule to be completed as it’s currently planned, considering that will midpoint remoter progress without the crappy past two years with COVID. And that’s just a good thing whoever you are.