Just a few weeks ago Charles Leclerc seemed certain to arrive home for the Monaco Grand Prix in the lead of the championship, but the season has been turned on its head after a difficult weekend in Spain.
Leclerc’s first DNF of the year dropped him to second behind Max Verstappen, and another lacklustre race from Carlos Sainz dropped Ferrari a place to Red Bull Racing in the teams standings.
At least this weekend Leclerc can rely on some home support, but he can’t rely on a home-track advantage. If anything, the opposite is true, with a home-race curse still to be broken.
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Further down the field and there’s some serious competition at the head of the midfield, with one familiar face to the Monte Carlo podium hoping to revive some Monaco magic, while under-pressure Aussie Daniel Ricciardo needs a good weekend to clear his bad Barcelona memories from his mind.
CAN CHARLES LECLERC ACTUALLY FINISH THE RACE?
Charles Leclerc is the most successful Monegasque racing driver of the Formula 1 world championship era.
Just not in his native Monaco. In fact there’s no racetrack on the planet at which Leclerc, the championship leader before last week’s retirement, has a worse record.
The 24-year-old has entered five races at the principality but is yet to see the chequered flag. He retired from both his Formula 2 races with technical problems and was put out of his first Formula 1 race at home thanks to a brake failure that sent him careering into the back of another car.
He then retired in 2019 after an aggressive attempted comeback from near the back of the grid landed him with a puncture and broken floor.
It seemed his luck was set to turn in 2021 when he took pole, but his car wasn’t properly screened after he crashed at the end of Q3, which meant he couldn’t even start the race.
Can his luck turn this year?
The purely superstitious among us might say that it already has.
Just two weeks ago Leclerc was taking part in a demonstration parade around the Monte Carlo streets in Niki Lauda’s Ferrari 312B3 from 1974 when it suffered a brake failure and spun backwards into the barriers at Rascasse.
An extremely on-brand occurrence for Leclerc at Monaco, might that mean he’s got his crash out of the way for this season?
If he has, Ferrari will be optimistic of a strong result, and not only because Leclerc has typically been quick around his home streets when he’s not in the fence.
The newly upgraded SF-75 was a weapon in Spain, even if a little understatedly so. Max Verstappen seemed unlikely to have an answer to Leclerc’s pole lap before he suffered his DRS failure, and the Dutchman noted that the Monegasque was pulling away from his with relative ease in the first stint of the grand prix.
And Ferrari’s tyre woes appear to have evaporated too, at least in the conditions of the Spanish Grand Prix. Leclerc ran 21 laps on full tanks on the soft compound to open the race, which was around a third longer than even Pirelli predicted would be possible.
Combined with the Ferrari car’s natural affinity for slow-speed corners and this is Leclerc’s best chance yet to win his home race. He just has to finish it.
HOW WILL THE NEW CARS FARE?
The Monte Carlo street circuit will be the sternest test of the 2022 car, and it might not be pretty.
The new aerodynamic philosophy simply isn’t suited to performing at its best at slow speed, and with last year’s race clocking in at a relatively pedestrian average speed of 157.83 kilometres per hour for winner Max Verstappen, there’s no slower race than the Monaco Grand Prix.
The problems the cars will face around a track comprising almost exclusively slow corners are manyfold.
For one, the cars are heavier this year, up by 46 kilos to an elephantine 798 kilograms. They’re far from the small, nimble machines you might imagine darting between the barriers. There’s also the matter of the larger tyres, which will reduce visibility from the cockpit.
More difficult for the drivers, however, is that the ground effect philosophy of the modern Formula 1 car is less effective at slow speed than the previous generation aero model. While they’re generating similar peak performance to last year at high speed, without high velocity air charging through the floor they’re just not producing the sort of downforce at slow speed drivers will have got used to over the years.
Weight and a lack of downforce combined has also tended to generate more lock-ups at low speed this season, which can of course be especially costly with the walls so close.
Then there’s the matter of suspension, which has been dumbed down this year. Team can no longer connect front and rear suspension to maintain an even ride height between axles under acceleration and braking, and because body roll and pitch undermine the effectiveness of the aerodynamic floor, teams are all running uncomfortably stiff suspension, which also helps to reduce bouncing.
But stiff suspension means it’s more difficult to ride the kerbs, which is crucial to lap time around street circuits. Finding a compromise here to give the drivers maximum confidence will be crucial to performance.
It’s going to be a very different set-up challenge in Monaco this season.
CAN BOTTAS MAKE HIS PODIUM RETURN?
The Spanish Grand Prix delivered a bittersweet result for Valtteri Bottas, who despite unreliability during free practice was able to qualify and race well in his upgraded Alfa Romeo.
The Finn had the pace to finish fourth ahead of Carlos Sainz and Lewis Hamilton, but the team’s dedication to a two-stop strategy that ultimately proved slower than the more aggressive three-stop meant he lacked pace late in the race, making him easy pickings for the Ferrari and Mercedes.
But there was no doubting the pace of his C42 in its updated form, and Bottas is optimistic there’s more performance to come at slower circuits, which he thinks will better suit the car.
“We made really good progress this weekend (in Spain), and that’s thanks to the upgrades we brought here,” he said. “Also, this type of track doesn’t play to our strengths, so I think we could be better next week.
“It’s a very different circuit to [Barcelona] … but I really believe it will suit our car strengths pretty well, so I’ve got big hopes for the next weekend
“I’m thinking it should be one of the best tracks in the calendar for our car. For sure the upgrades we brought for this weekend will also help us there, and with a nice big rear wing we should be good in Monaco.”
It’s rare for Bottas to go so far out on a limb backing his car, but there’s some preliminary data corroborating his position.
The final sector of the Spanish Grand Prix is focused on the slow, off-camber and high-kerbed chicane feeding the cars into the final corner and onto the front straight, and given Barcelona race tends to precede Monaco, it’s generally considered a decent rough indicator of performance in Monte Carlo.
A look at the qualifying sector times had Bottas fourth fastest overall and his Alfa Romeo car third among the teams.
1. Ferrari (Leclerc): 27.336 seconds
2. Red Bull Racing (Verstappen): 27.411 seconds
3. Alfa Romeo (Bottas): 27.443 seconds
4. Haas (Magnussen): 27.561 seconds
5. Mercedes (Russell): 27.698 seconds
6. McLaren (Norris): 27.768 seconds
7. Alpine (Ocon) 27.896 seconds
8. AlphaTauri (Tsunoda): 27.984 seconds
9. Aston Martin (Vettel): 28.197 seconds
10. Williams (Albon): 28.327 seconds
Telemetry also showed Bottas to be quicker than most other drivers through the apexes of the chicane, including Max Verstappen.
Bottas has tended to do well here in recent seasons — in fact he had Lewis Hamilton’s measure last year as the lead Mercedes despite the car’s grip difficulties.
It’s not to say a magic win is on the cards — the Alfa Romeo still lacks that ultimate pace — but with strong execution Bottas should find himself in the frame to capitalise on any chances that come his way.
CAN MERCEDES CONTINUE TO BUILD?
After the team’s strong form turnaround at the Spanish Grand Prix, the question at the forefront of mind in the paddock will be whether Mercedes can replicate its pace a second time this weekend.
The car’s performance in Barcelona was one thing — and one big thing, considering Hamilton’s mid-race pace in particular impressed, matching lap times with race winner Verstappen at times — but the body language from the drivers and staff was another thing entirely. There was genuine optimism they’d turned a corner. Maybe even confidence that they were almost out of the woods.
But there’s no greater outlier of a circuit on the calendar than Monte Carlo, and the Monaco Grand Prix might be about to halt some of that momentum.
As you’ll have noticed from the list above, Mercedes was solidly middle of the pack in terms of performance in the final sector in Spain — not great but not terrible — but the team’s own analysis suggests that it’s at low speed its upgraded car is struggling most, which would be a portent for this weekend.
But there’s a little more to story.
“We have been particularly off-pace this weekend in the slow corners in the last sector due to overheating,” Mercedes boss Toto Wolff said.
It’s a little bit ironic that the W13 was struggling with overheating tyres more than other teams when for most of this season — and indeed last season too — the Mercedes has tended to underwork its rubber.
In fact last year Mercedes suffered a particularly poor Monaco Grand Prix precisely because it couldn’t generate tyre temperature for one qualifying lap, and its race unravelled from there.
“Monaco in the past wasn’t our most happy place,” Wolff acknowledged. “I’m not sure I can explain scientifically why that is. But it’s going to be another learning point at least to bring us back into the game.”
Mercedes has won in Monaco just once in five years, and it’s unlikely to pull it off this season, but how the team fares as it attempts to turn its season around will be fascinating.
CAN DANIEL RICCIARDO BOUNCE BACK?
There have been glimmers of performance from Daniel Ricciardo all season — more than perhaps some have wanted to acknowledge — but his race in Spain was genuinely bad.
There may yet be ameliorating factors for it, and Ricciardo said he hoped he’d find the car had some kind of problem to help explain why he couldn’t squeeze any performance from the tyres, but there’s only so much sugar coating you can do when he finished well behind his teammate, who was suffering a serious bout of tonsillitis.
There’s never been a better time for a bounce back to form.
And the Monaco Grand Prix is one of Ricciardo’s favourites, and it’s historically one of his strongest. He was on the podium in every year but one during his Red Bull Racing career — the sole exception was 2015, in which he was the moral victor thanks to a double pit stop drama — making it one of his most profitable races from a points perspective.
But of course things have changed in recent years, culminating in a nadir last season, when he qualified and then finished 12th and a lap down. Norris finished on the podium.
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Making matters worse this season is that it’s difficult to know how the MCL36 will go. Early in the season Norris suggested the car would be at its worst in slow-speed corners, and while it’s improved a great deal since the dark days of Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, it’s still clearly not the intended finished article.
Ricciardo struggles aren’t of the magnitude they were this time last year. His points tally would have been greater were it not for some bad luck and circumstance through the year.
But you’re also only ever as good as your last race.
“Off the back of Spain I’ve got my head in the data with the engineers to make sure we’re in the best position possible to fight for a top-10 finish,” he said.
“We learnt a lot about the car, particularly with the good upgrades, and I have great trust in the team for us to keep improving.
“Hopefully we can put together a solid weekend.”
HOW CAN I WATCH IT?
Watch every practice session, qualifying and the race at the Monaco Grand Prix live on Kayo. New to Kayo.
Coverage of first practice starts on Saturday at 9:30pm AEST for a 10pm start, with second practice following at 1am Sunday.
Final practice starts at 9pm Saturday before the pre-qualifying show at 11pm ahead of a midnight start.
Pre-race coverage starts at 9:30pm before lights out for the Monaco Grand Prix at 11pm.