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🇦🇿 F1'22 R8: Blowout season

 It simply isn’t possible to compete at the top end of Formula 1 when you can’t finish the races. 

That’s not exactly ground-breaking insight, so I’ll elaborate. Ferrari’s double DNF was their first since their disastrous 2020 season, when they failed to finish firstly at Styria and then in their home race in Monza. 

The Baku non-finish puts the advantage of both titles to their rivals Red Bull and an intra-team battle is developing at the top of the standings, with Charles Leclerc looking upwards at Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez, while in the Teams’ championship, Mercedes are getting closer to striking distance of Ferrari with a third and fourth finish.

That's the thing with double DNFs - especially at the top - they’re rare. Since 2014, there have been 70 races where both drivers didn’t finish, but the top three teams only account for 14% of those, with three being the most in 2018. The other element of the rarity among the top three teams is that before 2022, they’d gone three years since doing it. 

Those 2018 DNFs were Mercedes having a bad day in Austria and Red Bull’s drivers going out in Bahrain and crashing into each other in Azerbaijan.

In 2022, so far, Verstappen and Perez didn’t finish the season opener in Sakhir and the double Ferrari failure accounts for the top three teams. That’s more than the other teams, with Haas’ double failure in Monaco the other one.

It’s possible to expect more non-finishes in 2022. New regulations, new cars, returning tracks after the pandemic and even a smattering of drivers in new places all would seem to be a perfect storm for more teams to fail, but that has been countered by having some brilliant staff up and down the grid, preventing it from happening. And if you break down the number of retirements, I’ve revisited a graph I made after the COTA race in 2021, updating it to look at the top six of the Championship, and how many retirements they have compared to the rest of the grid. 

We’re just over a third into the first season of the new regulations and the top six in the Championship account for eight retirements - there were 12 among those six in 2021, so we’re potentially heading towards the 18 in 2017 (seven for Verstappen) and 19 a year later (eight for Ricciardo). 

One driver who seems to be suffering a lot this season is Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz. After finishing every single race in 2021, the Spaniard knows he has one of - if not the - quickest car on the grid. And when he finishes, he hits the top four. But with three DNFs so far this season, Sainz shares that lead with Zhou Guanyu and Kevin Magnussen - drivers far further down the grid.
  
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Whether they are mistakes, mechanical failures or collisions, those errors all get compounded by knowing that it’s taking at least 12 points away from him each time. Had Sainz finished fourth in those non-finish races, the extra 36 points would mean he would be the lead Ferrari in the standings (admittedly a simplification). It’s easy to forget that’s where he was at the end of last season. 

Most years, the championship winner since 2014 has no more than one non-finish that year. Verstappen had three last year, although his consistency was incredible over the rest of the season. Every team has had at least one DNF so far this season, with the exception of Mercedes.

Lewis Hamilton and George Russell have finished every race so far, and if they can solve their bouncing problem, the three-team battle could be back on, especially with Russell, who has continued his fine form of finishing in the top five each race so far. In fact, he is only 17 points behind Leclerc in the standings now, and while the Ferrari is probably the fastest car on the circuit, it doesn’t really matter if it goes in for an early bath. 

Similarly with Mercedes, who could be formidable if they can solve their porpoising problem and keep the same levels of performance. With Hamilton struggling to exit his car at the end of the race, thousands of miles of international travel and a similarly-configured circuit is going to do nothing good for his back. 

Formula 1 moves back to Canada in a bizarre back-to-back from Eastern Europe, but the return of one of the sport’s most popular tracks won’t be welcomed by everyone. Bouncing cars at more than 200mph for 50+ laps anywhere is not sustainable long-term and while it’s understandable teams want to maximise their chances, at some point, driver safety will have to be considered. Whether the authorities standardise things, or demand that teams sort out the problem remains to be seen.

Just a casual 5,700 miles (Red Bull HQ used as an example)

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