2022 Regulations, Did it deliver on its promise?

[Nitrodaze]

When the F1 Management body proposed the new car layout, they promised closer racing and a broadly harder contest for wins with top midfield teams possibly having regular podium finishes. For many of us, we thought this was the end of having one team run away with the championship. This has not been the case by the evidence of the season. We still have a huge gap between the leading team and the next-best team. The status quo in the midfield remained more or less the same for teams within the same band of performance. The 2021 season with the old regulation was more exciting than the 2022 season; maybe not so for Redbull and Verstapenn supporters. From my perspective, the new regulation did not change much from the patterns of the preceding Hybrid era. It was same-mo same-mo with a new leading team with a similar performance advantage to the Mercedes glory days.

Many people that l have been talking to about this seem to agree that the 2022 regulation failed to deliver on its promise of a closer and harder fight for race wins. The midfield teams seem to be the most disenfranchised by the regulations. As this is where the closer and harder position fight seem to be happening. It has become even harder to fight for championship points in the midfield. And the gap between the sharp end of the grid and the midfield remains more or less the same as it was in the prior Hybrid era. It has become even more crucial to have quality drivers in the midfield cars to guarantee good points haul by the end of the season, as driving errors and car damage are doubly punished by the more competitive environment of the midfield.

The cost cap has had very little effect on the top teams, it seems. Even with the problems faced by Mercedes and Ferrari, they managed to out-develop their cars relative to the midfield teams, where progress was slower.

That said, all teams would have learnt a great deal from the 2022 season. Hopefully, we would see the positive effects of the 2022 regulations kick in during the coming 2023 season. One would hope that Mercedes and Ferrari get their act together and turn up with cars on a similar performance to Redbull. Then we would be best placed to see who is the real best driver (or drivers) of this new era. Luckily for Verstappen, he did not get any real challenge this season; not even from his teammate in the same car as we did with Hamilton and Rosberg for instance.

For Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz Jr sake, it is good there is a change going on at the top at Ferrari. They were very questionable on a number of occasions. The very British rivalry brewing in Mercedes would also be very exciting to watch, as the coming-of-age young racer in Russell, takes on the mature seven-time F1 champion in Mercedes Cars on level performance with the Redbull. There is plenty to look forward to in 2023. Hopefully, the FIA would do an equal or better job than they did this 2020 season.

By the way, l got this from this publication https://medium.com/motor-racing/2022...r-1ebf0a0e2022