The development war is the order of the day in the 2022 Formula 1 season due to the budget limit that causes so many headaches for the teams. The magic figure of 140 million dollars (about 124 million euros at current exchange rates) is on everyone’s mind in the paddock, and that is that the upgrades in the new single-seaters suppose a very large cost, but without these improvements, it would be impossible to get results.
Some teams have spent several million trying to make a faster car, such as Red Bull, who at the Emilia Romagna GP introduced a major package of updates with which they have achieved four consecutive wins. Some rumors indicated that they had made a disbursement close to 8 million dollars, which would correspond to 75% of the total allocated to development that Haas boss Guenther Stenier said .
With the victory in the Monaco Grand Prix, the Milton Keynes team escapes in the constructors’ world championship, and its chief engineer, Paul Monaghan , gave us the keys to the development of the RB18 comparing himself with Ferrari, his closest rival for the title , as well as leaving some clues as to when they would introduce more improvements.
“We are learning to evolve our program and our lap time,” said the Briton. “It’s relative to that, we can see what Ferrari is good at and what it’s bad at, and I think it would be naive of us not to do that.”
“They tend to be quite strong at low speed, and we do it in other areas of the circuit. There is a big visual difference if you look from time to time at how we have achieved our lap time and they have achieved theirs,” he continued. Monaghan.
“Are they stuck in that pattern? I don’t know. Are we stuck in ours? Not at all,” he said. “We are open to change, and if you stand still in this sport, you can often fall behind.”
The head of the Austrian car’s brains gave rough dates for possible changes to the grid pecking order, which would coincide with the introduction of the single-seater updates .
“At the moment, I would say that we are quite happy with our work as it is, and I think that Baku will make the whole world go in a certain direction,” he said. “I think Silverstone could give us a bit of a difference, and Spielberg will do a bit of the same thing.”
“In Hungary, I expect there will be a change again, but that’s the nature of the track and how we best exploit our lap time, right? So for the moment, I’d say our work is reasonably good, but when we get to Abu Dhabi we may have done well or we may have done badly,” Monaghan explained.
The race in Monaco caused Red Bull to modify some parts of its car, but it will not be the only track where changes will be seen, as the same engineer went on to say: “The steering geometry revisions, which are more than just a steering arm, yes they have changed a bit, it would be difficult to race without them.
“Brake cooling too,” he added. “I guess if you look at Hungary or Singapore, possibly we’ll take parts to those particular races, and then… where else might we need more brake cooling? Probably Spielberg and Baku we’ll have a slightly different arrangement.”
The budget cap means that the teams have limited development, and at Red Bull they are aware of how hard it will be to organize their 2022 season with the current rules: “The federation may not thank me, but it is very regulatory, we are quite limited as to what we can do.”
“The absence of aerodynamic possibilities makes it very expensive to do the little things that we used to do with all the winglets , the gurneys on the front wing, and so on. It’s not practical, it’s not rewarding, because of the regulations that tie us to the stipulated geometries, it’s very expensive,” said Paul Monaghan.
