Folks, it is with a heavy heart that I must admit Scuderia Ferrari built a real banger of a car for 2022. It’s pretty easy to dislike the longest standing team in F1, as they continue to make dumb mistakes and haven’t really been title contenders for several years, while pushing their drivers to be ever more aggressive. Things seem to have changed in recent years, however, as the current driver lineup of Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc is one of the highest regarded, and while they had a bit of a fall off in 2020, are expected to be back among the title contenders in 2022.
As delivered to the world on Thursday, the team’s 2022 contender Ferrari F1-75 is among the most beautiful F1 cars of all time, certainly of the last twenty years. It’s an aggressive departure from what other teams have thus far shown off, and shows off some design elements that hopefully will translate to speed. The Scuderia has been working on this car since 2020, and dedicated most of its 2021 engineering efforts to developing this new-generation racer.
I’m no engineer, and I don’t really understand how air flows or how that makes one race car better or worse than another race car. For that kind of insight, go check out Sam Collins’ twitter thread about the new car. It’s good.
As for me, I’m good at looking at cars and saying “whoa, that’s pretty!” This one absolutely bowled me over when I saw it, and I hope it continues to be a looker as the season continues on and minor changes are made to the car’s design. I appreciate the aggressively thin and dainty nose cone, the double-supports for the rear wing, and the simple black/red livery. The best element by far, though, is the deeply swept sidepod bowl. My associate here at Jalopnik dot com, one Adam Ismail, said “Sidepod looks like an ear but like, in a good way” and he’s right. In a good way.
It’s likely that the car will receive a few minor updates before the first race in Bahrain next month, but this is about as close to the real thing as we’ve seen from any car launches this month. I’m very happy that Ferrari didn’t opt to put their livery on an FIA show car, like those cowards at Red Bull did. From what we have seen of the cars that have been shown off so far, however, it looks like that all of the teams are finding different strategies to achieve the same effect, and I think that’s extremely fucking cool.
It’s entirely possible that one or more of the teams have got their 2022 car extremely wrong, and the grid order will vary wildly from where it was last season. For example, if Red Bull spent too much time developing their 2021 car to help propel Max to a (asterisk) World Championship, then they may not have spent enough time developing this year’s car, and will be on the back foot going into Bahrain, ditto Mercedes. Teams that dropped everything in 2020 to start building to the next regulations, namely Ferrari, Haas, and Williams, among others, could be much better placed this year than last.
Ferrari worked hard to get its engine back to the pace it had in 2019, though hopefully legally this time, and it looks like some of that effort was successful. Being that the car will continue to use the same drivetrain as last season, that’s all well and good. Here’s hoping this gorgeous chassis has the ass to cash those checks. I’m ready for the season to start, so let’s get shit poppin’ off.