Verstappen picks up the pieces in Baku as reliability paradigm shifts for Ferrari

In the 110 days since the first day of pre-season testing in Barcelona, the start of Ferrari’s 2022 championship campaign could be split into two halves of almost entirely contrasting fortunes.

The first 55 days saw r four seconds by the time Perez pitted for hards at the end of lap 16.Ferrari establish themselves as the most formidable force on the grid. The F1-75 was not just fast, but reliable. They racked up more miles than any team in pre-season testing, won two of the first three races – while Red Bull recorded a retirement rate of 50% – to sit almost 50 points clear at the top of the constructors’ standings. Charles Leclerc 38 points ahead of Max Verstappen in the drivers’ standings.

But 55 days later as the chequered flag flew in Baku, the smoke pluming out of the rear of Leclerc’s abandoned car in the pit lane said a lot about the state of Ferrari’s championship hoped. Now another team has faster and more reliable package: Red Bull.

Hours earlier, it had again looked so promising for Leclerc and Ferrari heading into a grand prix Sunday. Leclerc had secured his fourth consecutive pole position by almost three tenths of a second from Sergio Perez, and a fraction more from the championship leader Verstappen. Looking to convert his pole to victory for the first time since the Australian Grand Prix, Leclerc admitted he just wanted to “finish the job” in Azerbaijan.

However, Perez and Red Bull had other ideas. After being psyched up for battle on the formation lap by his engineer Hugh Bird telling him “elbows out into turn one – it’s all to play for,” Perez found he need not have to bully his way into the lead when the lights went out after all.

Perez’s sprint off the line was good enough to draw him side-by-side with the Ferrari on the run to the braking zone, giving him the position of strength as they entered the left-hander. Leclerc’s lock-up only made it inevitable that he would lose the lead and he quickly had to focus less on Perez ahead and more on Verstappen filling his mirrors behind on the run to turn two.

All cars in the top 10 grid slots had started on the medium tyre compound and all largely held their positions on the opening lap, only Perez and Sebastian Vettel improving one place apiece. But with track temperatures within touching distance of 50C, there was no time for Perez to bask in the thrill of taking the lead, Bird instructing him to immediately begin managing his tyres.

After qualifying, Verstappen had expressed confidence in Red Bull’s potential race pace and he demonstrated it by pulling away from fourth-placed Carlos Sainz Jnr at a rate of half a second per lap, while applying pressure to second-placed Leclerc ahead. Sainz could only remark how “Red Bull look quick” as he watched Verstappen slowly become smaller ahead of him.

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But then, approaching turn four on the ninth lap, Sainz suddenly had more pressing concerns.

“Oh! Something…” he radioed as his Ferrari juddered awkwardly under braking. “Brake-by-wire failure,” he elaborated. “Something failed.” Ferrari later confirmed his hydraulics were the source of the problem.

For the third time in eight races, Sainz was out – his Ferrari having failed him for the first time this season. Race director Niels Wittich deployed the Virtual Safety Car at the exact moment leader Perez was passing the broken white line marking pit entry, meaning that by the time Bird told him to “pit, pit,” Perez could only reply “yeah, I missed it.”

After the race, Perez blamed a “miscommunication” for not getting into the pits in time. “I’m not the one deciding when to pit. Unfortunately, we have certain communications in place that we know when to pit and when the window’s open, but a few things went wrong today,” he explained.

Ironically, the two-second deficit Leclerc had lost to the leader allowed him to react to Ferrari’s call to box, permitting him to switch to hard tyres and rejoin behind the Red Bulls in third. Behind, everyone from George Russell in fourth to Yuki Tsunoda in eighth followed suit, with Vettel jumping ahead of Lewis Hamilton in the process.

When the Virtual Safety Car was lifted on lap 10, Leclerc had a 13-second gap to Verstappen who was two second adrift of his team mate. Immediately, Leclerc was faster than the pair ahead. After a couple of laps of green flag running, he was lapping over a second a lap faster than the leader.

“I’m starting to lose the rears,” Perez warned as Verstappen begin to eat into his lead a couple of tenths per lap until eventually getting within DRS range of his team mate at the end of lap 14 as Perez’s lap times were now falling severely.

“No fighting,” came Red Bull’s clear instruction to Perez, before Verstappen pulled to the inside of his team mate at the start of lap 15 and through into the lead, Perez putting up no resistance but also losing hardly any time in doing so.

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“It was the right call not to fight,” Perez later explained after the race, “because I didn’t have any pace at the time and Max deserved to be ahead at that point. We hit a lot of deg on that medium tyre after the Virtual Safety Car.”

Freed into clear air, Verstappen pulled over two seconds over Perez on the first lap alone, his advantage growing to over four seconds by the time Perez pitted for hards at the end of lap 16. Perez resumed 18 seconds behind Leclerc, who himself was now 8.6 seconds away from the race leader and catching.

Verstappen made his first stop at the end of the following lap, allowing Leclerc into the lead of the grand prix for the first time. Ferrari’s quick reactions under Virtual Safety Car had been rewarded by a lead of 13.6 seconds over Verstappen, but with over 30 laps still remaining on the hard tyres if they wanted to take them to the end of the race.

However, Leclerc’s tyres – much like the rest of his car – would only enjoy two more tours of the circuit before his mirrors would be filled by the unmistakable haze of an expiring power unit as he rounded the turn 18-19 kink at the end of lap 20.

“Problem! Problem! Engine,” Leclerc cried into the radio, a familiar sinking feeling engulfing him. “No, no. It’s done.”

For the second time in three races, Leclerc spluttered into the pit lane, a comfortable lead having suddenly evaporated in a blink of an eye and his fourth consecutive pole position having delivered frustration, not elation on Sunday yet again. “Sorry about that,” his engineer Xavier Marcos Padros meekly offered over that radio, as much out of social obligation than anything.

“Any DNF is hard,” Leclerc told the media pen as the sounds of the power units that hadn’t failed continued to echo around the paddock. “Obviously now is not the third in a row but, to be honest, Monaco felt like a DNF. So it’s the third disappointment in a row and it’s not easy.”

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Red Bull’s frantic number-crunching over how best to take the fight to Leclerc had suddenly ceased. Now their cars held the leading positions, Russell’s third-placed Mercedes offering minimal threat behind, and the team’s thoughts turned to preserving their one-two.

Out front, Verstappen was instructed to “lift off, easy on the brakes and easy on traction”. But despite being told to target a 1’48.0, the leader was running consistently in the mid 1’47s.

“Max, that last lap was a 47.5,” Gianpiero Lambiase reminded his driver. “That’s close to 48.0,” Verstappen insisted.

“You know full well what it’s like to lose a race around here,” Lambiase warned in response. “Keep your head down. Target 48.0”.

“I’ll try to be closer,” Verstappen conceded.

Within a handful of laps, Kevin Magnussen’s Haas pulled off into retirement on the approach to the tricky turn 15 left hander, causing the Virtual Safety Car to be deployed at the perfect time for those who had pitted under the first VSC to split their stints by taking a second set of new tyres to see them to the end of the race. Had Leclerc still been in the race, it would have been ideally timed for him.

As it was Verstappen, Perez and Russell came in from the top three places, as did Hamilton from fifth and the McLaren of Daniel Ricciardo from sixth. He had started the race on the hard tyres and not yet pitted, so this VSC fell perfectly for him.

The top three remained in order, while Hamilton dropped behind Yuki Tsunoda. The two AlphaTauris, both on one-stop strategies, lay between him and his team mate Russell. Hamilton’s fears of a punishing and painful race in his super-stiff Mercedes had materialised, he was having trouble keeping the W13 out of the wall in the high-speed kinks before the pit lane, and later described the afternoon as the most painful race he’d had in Formula 1.

Pushing through the pain barrier, Hamilton slipped passed Tsunoda once the Virtual Safety Car was lifted to claim fifth place. He then took only seven laps to whittle down the 10 seconds to Gasly ahead, eventually catching within DRS range of the AlphaTauri.

He was helped in no small part by Nicholas Latifi, who for the second race in a row made a nuisance of himself by failing to yield to a car behind in good time. The Williams driver waited until the end of the main straight to let his pursuers by and, unlike in Monaco, earned a five-second time penalty for his troubles.

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“Okay Pierre,” Gasly’s engineer Pierre Hamelin cautioned, “we need to make sure we keep it on-track with Hamilton. We need to secure these points – it’s still a very good position for us.”

Despite the warning, Gasly was not going to move over for the Mercedes. As Hamilton tucked into his slipstream with DRS, Gasly went defensive to the middle of the track to resist his attack. It was effective, but Hamilton’s superior traction from his fresher tyres allowed him to pull to the inside along the second DRS straight and complete the move into turn three.

Third and fourth places in the race were now secured, but first and second place had been since the moment Leclerc’s Ferrari started smoking some 30 laps prior. At a track that so often produces wild, chaotic races, this time it had not been the circuit itself that had bitten, but the Ferraris had self-sabotaged their own races and handed a fifth win in a row for Red Bull.

Verstappen’s 25th career victory had arguably been one of his least challenging but it was still a relief for Red Bull team principal Christian Horner to see how strong the team’s like-for-like race pace compared to Ferrari’s before Leclerc pulled off the circuit.

“It’s a shame in many respects that the race didn’t pan out, because I do think we had a good race car today and I think we would have beaten Charles strategically in the route that we picked as well,” Horner explained.

“The important thing was, on their misfortune, that we capitalised on that and we banked the points. Obviously the championships look healthy at the moment, but we can see how quickly that can change.”

Perez had looked just as quick as his team mate throughout the weekend, but could not keep up with Verstappen’s race pace on Sunday – evidenced by how Verstappen caught and passed him.

“Certainly Max was quite a lot stronger in that phase of the race,” said Perez, gaining second in the championship on the day. “Then it was mainly about bringing home after the Ferrari issue.

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“So a few bits to understand today to try to improve them for Montreal and improve our race pace, because certainly Max deserved the win today.”

Russell enjoyed one of the more anonymous drives in recent memory, happily benefiting from the Ferraris dropping out to run in a very lonely third for the majority of the race and take an unexpected yet welcome podium.

“I think P5 was the maximum we could have achieved on merit,” Russell said. “But we can’t keep on relying on others’ misfortune, and we need to find more performance. And that’s what everyone’s trying their hardest to achieve.”

But for the second time in three rounds, the biggest story in the race was in Ferrari throwing away a strong chance of a victory through their reliability. After such a strong start to the season for Ferrari where Verstappen and Red Bull had been the ones breaking down and dropping valuable championship points, the paradigm has shifted. Verstappen, however, didn’t have much sympathy.

“I would always say shit happens,” he said. “Yeah, that’s racing. It happened to me, it happened to many people in the past. Unfortunately, it’s happening to Charles.”

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