Given what happened in the first grand prix of the 2022 Formula 1 season, everything seemed to indicate that the fight for victory in the Miami Grand Prix would once again be very close between Ferrari and Red Bull and that is how it was finally from the qualifying session. .
Due to the characteristics of the Florida track, a low-downforce set-up seemed most appropriate, and in fact the Maranello team had prepared a new aerodynamic package based on a low-downforce Miami-specific rear wing.
However, midway through the event, Ferrari’s engineers made the decision to change course, reverting to the more downforced, spoon-shaped rear wing, the same spec they used at Imola, a race in which they were unable to match the performance of the energy drink team.
On the other side of the battle, the Milton Keynes -based outfit stuck to their philosophy and idea throughout the weekend, focusing on a more off-load downforce package.
The decision of the Maranello team was due to what happened in Imola, where Red Bull took much better care of the tires and swept away. To prevent that from happening again, Ferrari did not mount the new aerodynamic package on the F1-75 and opted for a configuration that made it lose some top speed, but, in turn, helped with tire wear.
In qualifying, Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz did not miss that lack of speed compared to Max Verstappen and Sergio Pérez, since they achieved the first two positions and in principle, that also proved the Prancing Horse engineers right. But in the race everything changed.
When the important moment arrived, where the points are distributed, the F1-75 brought out one of its weak points compared to the RB18; tire management.
Despite making a setup change related to that weakness, once again the Red Bull car was better in that regard. In addition, the Ferrari modification, with which he lost some km / h, also played against him at the moment in which Leclerc had to face Verstappen on the track, first to defend and at the end of the race to attack.
On both occasions, the Dutch driver emerged victorious. In the first action he was able to overtake the Monegasque with relative ease to take the lead and in the second he knew how to take advantage of the important advantage that those extra km/h gave compared to the Ferrari driver, who not even with the help of the DRS could return to the first place after the restart of the race after a brief period in which the safety car came out on the track.
