After a Friday in which Formula 1 teams learned next to nothing about how their cars would perform around the Imola circuit in the dry, Saturday gave them a 21-lap dress rehearsal for the fourth round of the 2022 season.
The first sprint race of the year may have ended with the same front row confirmed for the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix that had lined up on Saturday afternoon, but now both Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc have clear ideas about the strengths of their cars and the kind of race they can expect to have on Sunday.
Having never been separated by more than 1.7 seconds over the 16 green flag laps prior to Verstappen’s sprint-winning overtake at Tamburello, it seems the pair are as closely matched around Imola as they have been at any of the opening three rounds up to this point. That was demonstrated after the Safety Car restart, where the pair both clocked up 14 consecutive racing laps in the 1’19s before Verstappen caught and challenged the Ferrari for the lead.
Leclerc’s race pace was a touch faster than Verstappen’s initially, but not as consistent as the Red Bull could manage. Verstappen stuck to his pace, logging lap after lap within the 1’19.2s, until he eventually began to reel in the Ferrari. In pushing Leclerc to keep him out of his DRS range, Verstappen managed to manifest some painful right-front tyre graining on the leader’s car.
“I think the pace is quite similar,” Leclerc said after the sprint race. “I tried to push at the beginning to get a bit of a gap and for Max not being the DRS zone, because I knew that I will have been vulnerable if it was the case. But I paid the price a little bit later on in the race and had some graining and really struggled in the last two, three laps.”
Gallery: 2022 Emilia-Romagna sprint race in picturesFerrari now have a huge volume of meaningful data to sift through to figure out how to treat their tyres more kindly tomorrow. But there’s not much they can do with their car to help, save…