Haas’s Hungarian Grand Prix upgrade will be their last this year

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In the round-up: Haas will not develop the VF-22 any further after bringing a final set of upgrades to the Hungarian Grand Prix.

In brief

Haas to stop development after Hungary upgrade package

Haas team principal Günther Steiner says they will switch to working on their 2023 car after the Hungarian Grand Prix, with no upgrades planned following the summer break.

“We are bringing upgrades, which are developments, in Hungary,” said Steiner. “And then we finish it there.

“We think we’ll finish it there because we need to start to focus on next year because there is much more gain in that than keeping on pushing it, putting money into this year.”

Latifi will run upgrade package from French Grand Prix

Nicholas Latifi‘s car will receive the same upgrade package that has been tested on team mate Alex Albon‘s since Silverstone, from this weekend onwards.

“Having introduced some new parts to Alex’s car over the last couple of races, we are now in a position where both cars can run with the upgrades,” explained head of vehicle performance Dave Robson. “Although the weather in Silverstone and the sprint format in Austria were not ideal for testing, we have seen enough encouraging feedback to be confident that we have taken a step forward.”

Latifi said he is “super excited to get to France because it’s the first race where I’m going to have the upgrade package”. “We’ve seen some positive signs from it on Alex’s car so far, so I’m looking forward to getting my first taste.

“Hopefully it can bring us that extra bit of relative pace that we’ve missed and put us more in the fight.”

Latifi is the only driver who has started every race this year but remains yet to score a point.

Mortara “extremely lucky” in New York downpour

Edoardo Mortara was relieved to come away with a point score in the opening Formula E race in New York last weekend after aquaplaning off in a heavy downpour. He took fifth on the road but fell to ninth in the final classification after taking a five-second time penalty for driving too quickly during a full-course yellow period.

The Venturi racer was poised to strike when the downpour brought the race to an abrupt and early end. “I spent the first half saving quite a lot of energy so we could spend more in the final laps and I think the strategy worked very well,” Mortara explained. I made up a lot of ground in my final Attack Mode and I think that if the race had stayed dry, we might have caught the cars in front of us.”

But the deluge sent several cars spinning off and brought out the red flags. “When it did start to rain, the conditions changed very quickly and I aquaplaned about 250 metres before turn six. I was worried that I was going to hit the cars that had already crashed in front of me but I put my foot on the brake, managed to stop and floored the throttle to turn the car around. I was extremely lucky to be able to continue.”

Mortara’s ninth place kept him on top of the standings going into Sunday’s race, a result he called “very strange for me, but under the circumstances I’m happy.” But 10th place in the second part of the double-header meant he was unable to prevent Mercedes’ Stoffel Vandoorne taking the championship lead off him with four races to go.

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Comment of the day

As synthetic fuels and biofuels take a bigger role in motorsport, Alan D explains the difference:

ZeroPetroleum is not the same as biofuels. You use water, CO2 which you’ve captured from air, some catalysts, a bucketload of energy, and some very clever chemistry to synthesise hydrocarbons. Basically you use electricity to make hydrogen from the water, you use electricity to make carbon monoxide from CO2, and then even more energy to fuse them together into hydrocarbons.

So forget all the arguments about food crops. There is no biomass involved. You just need energy, and lots of it. In terms of inputs and outputs, it is basically the same as what green plants do in photosynthesis, sunlight-powered conversion of air and water to organic chemicals.

You must always put in more energy than you get out, and it would make no sense whatsoever to use energy generated from burning fossil fuels. Synthesising hydrocarbons is not as energy-efficient as using your energy to directly power electric trains, or using it to charge batteries in vehicles, but for planes where you need high energy density, it may be a lifeline which allows us to continue using existing technology whilst saving our oil reserves for more important things such as making plastics. A word without plastics would be very grim indeed.

Happy birthday!

Happy birthday to K, Steve and Arijitmaniac!

On this day in motorsport

Former Brabham Formula 1 driver Giovanna Amati turns 60 today

Author information

Hazel Southwell
Hazel is a motorsport and automotive journalist with a particular interest in hybrid systems, electrification, batteries and new fuel technologies....

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12 comments on “Haas’s Hungarian Grand Prix upgrade will be their last this year”

  1. I thought that would be the first upgrade for Hass.

    1. I remember earlier Haas mentioned a major update wouldn’t appear until France. Since then, no mention. Now it’s Hungary and nothing after? Well, then I hope it’s a really good update!

    2. Two updates in one: the first and the last for this season :)

    3. Probably best they stop development on this one and concentrate on their 2026 car …

      In all honesty I think the way they have tried to get there head around the existing car has obviously paid some dividends without massive development expenditure, where Aston has a complete new design and now they have to get their heads around it which seems to have sent them backwards.

      It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out for them, I’m guessing they’ll be miles under the budget cap.

  2. The regulation budget cap, yes. Their own? No.

    The only reason this is the only update is because they can’t do more.

    A lot of that is down to repairing Mick’s car so often earlier in the season, a lot of it is down to them simply not having the budget in place after the Russian fiasco, etc

  3. Stopping development on the current car is a wise move even though technical rules remain stable for the next season.

    I reckon Latifi will still be slower on pace.

    Budget cap & wind tunnel time allocations will tighten the field over time, but the same situation with only some teams being able to win on pace will remain unless F1 becomes a fully-fledged spec series.

    Interesting & informative COTD, although I don’t necessarily share the view that a world without plastic would be grim, especially as people generally try & use as little plastic as possible these days.

    1. @jerejj I’m actually of the mind that abandoning the current car development when there are huge gains to be made over the next few years in this rules era is a big mistake. I do however appreciate that a lot of the development work on their car is outsourced and their model of development is a new car at the start of the year and a aero package mid season. I suppose they can still gather data and test some mechanical concepts through to the end of the year though.

      1. I think they will be running full time to understand what exactly to do, well as far as their budget allows, @slowmo. Haas has pretty clearly shown that while they are not fast everywhere, the biggest hurdle has been their reliability, so if they now take a solid step forward in pace and can consolidate their current pace to stay in the midfield (between 6-18th depending on execution, track and a bit of luck) they will still make a usefull step up in the championship standings from were they were and can use that to make a next step for next season.

    2. A world without any plastics would be the end of much of our medical services as we know them as well as many many technological processes we heavily rely on @jerejj.

      Sure, given time most of that can actually be made another way, using all sorts of new synthetic materials made out of algea, mold, seeweed, starch, and some of it might actually involve a process not unlike that used to make syntethic fuels to arrive at a cleaner (as in without impurities) alternative that is made without using oil and natural gas as the raw material. But we are still at least several decennia away from that, if we even get there.

      So we should use this as a step as well to make sure we don’t have to replace most of our ships, trains, planes as well as the millions and millions of trucks, cars, tractors, agricultural and mining vehicles we operate immediately and waste resources on making the replacements for now.

      1. The relative amount of resources used during construction is much less than that from using that equipment though – it is inherent to those types of transport that the usage is going to be the most energy intensive phase of their life cycle.

    3. Jere, “people generally try & use as little plastic as possible these days”

      People nowadays use less plastic, and create a bit less pollution, and that’s a really good thing, it reduces the amount of microplastic getting into the food chain. But it doesn’t make a huge difference to the amount of plastic we use. The whole of modern life is built on hydrocarbons and plastics. Look around your room right now and think how many of the things you use are only practical because of plastics. The keyboard you used to type your reply, the mouse, the insulation around the wiring, the mains plug on the end of it, the encapsulation around the integrated circuits and capacitors, the fan keeping you cool, even your contact lenses. And when you next watch F1, and the carbon fibre cars, what do you think carbon fibre is made from? When you think of all the amazing things we can use our limited oil reserves for, burning it in large quantities in cars seems incredibly wasteful.

  4. Happy birthday to Giovanna

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