It’s awards season! The time of year when we at GrandPrix247 look back on the 2022 Formula 1 season and choose who gets one of our awards. Our team of the year? Red Bull.
This one was an easy decision, to be honest, and we didn’t need to see Red Bull clinch their fifth F1 Constructors’ Title since 2013 to make up our minds.
The Constructors’ trophy was just a testament of the level at which Red Bull operated in 2022, and on all fronts, car design and development, race operations, strategy… you name it they had wings and not one could stop them.
Christian Horner lamented that it took the team nine years to break Mercedes’ grip on the F1 Championship, but there was a hidden blessing for all those years of playing catchup with the Silver Arrows, and that is honing their skills in strategy and race execution, as Red Bull always had to try something different and think out of the box to try and beat the faster Mercedes.
But in 2022, Red Bull completed the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle – the car, as the RB18 was the class of the 2022 field, especially in the hands of their double F1 Champion Max Verstappen, but they kept their edge in all other aspects of their operations.
They were always spot on with their strategies, ingenious at some races – Hungary springs to mind – and kept the development of their car, putting it on a strict diet to lower its weight, and pulling out a big advantage over Ferrari
It wasn’t smooth sailing all the way though
And let’s not forget that Red Bull had their fair share of off-track distractions, dealing with the FIA’s TD039 ignited by the competitions accusations that the RB18 was illegal, their cost cap breach saga, and last but not least; losing their founder Dietrich Mateschitz.
On the TD039, Red Bull’s seemed to go faster after the TD039, and while we will not go into the “Where they cheating or not” discussion regarding the cost saga, the team did well to keep their heads down throughout that matter and did not lose focus, the same applying on the passing of Mateschitz.
Red Bull also had to deal with reliability at the start of the season with both cars breaking down in Bahrain, while Verstappen’s broke down in Melbourne as well, but the team sorted out the reliability almost immediately.
In the end, the team won both Titles with races to spare, and were able to dedicate their season their late founder, the only blemish being the Sergio Perez’s failure to beat Charles Leclerc to runner up in the Drivers’ Standings, while keeping in mind the team order embarrassment of Sao Paulo, where Verstappen refused to yield his sixth place to Perez.
That didn’t effect the final outcome, and Perez losing out on second place cannot be blamed fully on the team as the Mexican played a role in it due to his midseason slump as well. Other than that, it was the perfect season for the Milton Keynes outfit. (Compiled by Jad Mallak)
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