The Spanish Grand Prix traditional heralds the start of the European season and when the championship campaign begins to pick up pace.
Formula 1 has had what feels like an unusually long prelude to this middle leg of the year. Five of the six races to date have been street tracks, and the only race in Europe has been Monaco, the biggest outlier on the calendar.
While there’s no doubting Red Bull Racing’s supremacy, it’s difficult to say exactly where the other teams stand based on the sample set of venues.
The Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya will provide us the most accurate reading of the paddock’s temperature so far.
So it’s particularly important that F1’s biggest underperformers lift in what will be billed as the most representative grand prix to date, when the blowtorch will be at its most brutal.
Three protagonists have big questions to answer.
Sergio Pérez is coming off the back of a shocker non-scoring weekend in Monaco. We’re six rounds in but already Max Verstappen’s only title challenger is wilting under the pressure.
Ferrari has had a shocker of a year so far, slumping to fourth in the constructors standings and 30 points behind Aston Martin. It’s made a big deal of its upgrade pipeline, which will deliver new parts at every race for the rest of the year, but the pressure is on this weekend’s big package to show real progress.
Lance Stroll is also under the microscope after a dodgy run of form has left Fernando Alonso doing Aston Martin’s heavy lifting, leaving the year’s most improved team at risk of dropping back down the constructors championship table.
If any of them are going to rebound, they’ll need to start in Spain.
PÉREZ IN SEARCH OF REDEMPTION
Was it really only two rounds ago we were talking about Sergio Pérez as a genuine title challenger?
The Mexican had just won both the race and the sprint at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, which came two races after his controlling victory in Saudi Arabia.
His points deficit was just six points in April.
But Pérez has been pummelled since then, pantsed in Miami and then committing the egregious sin of crashing out of Q1 without a competitive lap time.
In just two races the championship gap has blown out to 39 points.
It was interesting to see Pérez’s devastated response in Monaco. The reality of his self-inflicted situation was clearly weighing heavily on him. It was almost a state of shock.
It wasn’t just the sheer points lost but also the wide-open opportunity missed to prevent Verstappen from walking to another victory on a street circuit, where Pérez supposedly has an edge.
It’s true 39 points isn’t an enormous margin with 16 rounds remaining and Pérez has shown at a couple of races this year that when things click — usually on street tracks — he can command races, something he can take heart from.
“I’ve been a match to Max since the beginning of the season in one way or another,” Pérez said in Barcelona. “It is sometimes better, sometimes worse, and it’s where I believe you have to be.
“The positive thing is the speed is there to be able to swing around things, but for now I am mainly focused on weekend by weekend and I want to win and get victories on my side.”
But the Spaniard will also have to be honest with himself: he needs things to go his way to put the championship in doubt this season.
A buffer of this size is already large enough to protect Verstappen against a technical retirement. A few more easy wins will put him past the two-race threshold, at which point a comeback would be realistically beyond reach even with two-thirds of the season to go.
“I think being teammates with Max is probably the toughest thing you can have, because he is a driver who has the most form of all.
“I do believe it’s possible to beat him.
“I have to do that regularly, and that’s the main objective for us.”
The Spanish Grand Prix would be a meaningful place for him to start.
His career-best Barcelona finish came here last year — second to Verstappen — after he was prevented from racing the Dutchman early despite being the faster car on a different strategy.
He was then ordered to wave his teammate past into first place at the end of the race.
It cast the die for 2022. Changing the tone this weekend wouldn’t be just nice but essential.
FERRARI’S MOMENT OF TRUTH
When rain cancelled the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix, Ferrari postponed its important suspension upgrades until Barcelona, figuring that Monaco was too specific and too potentially costly a place to spend time trialling new parts.
The moment of truth is upon the team now.
At the Spanish Grand Prix Ferrari will bring the rear suspension revision that will complement the aerodynamic upgrades applied in Miami two races ago.
It will also reportedly bring a new floor and revised sidepods, amounting to a significant update.
But pure performance isn’t Ferrari’s aim.
The team has already collected a pair of poles — both in Azerbaijan — and was a close contender in Monaco last weekend. The SF-23 is consistently the RB19’s closest Saturday challenger this season.
Instead the team hopes the suspension will help bridge the gap between its reasonably competitive Saturdays and dire Sunday.
“At the moment the thing is that we have an extremely peaky car,” Leclerc explained on Thursday. “In qualifying, on the one-lap pace, with new tyres, with wind that we know exactly — how to drive the car, it’s okay.
“As soon as we go a little bit out of those conditions, the car loses so much downforce overall.
“So we have been working a lot on that with this new car.
“This should help us to not gain that much performance but to at least be a bit more consistent throughout the weekend, which hopefully will help us to have a better result on the Sunday.”
The Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya will be a stern test.
There’s a reason F1 usually tests here. The track has a combination of slow, medium and high-speed corners that test everything from aerodynamic performance to mechanical grip to tyre wear.
Aerodynamically Ferrari has been struggling for consistency, while it’s also suffered from offensive levels of rubber degradation.
Bringing significant upgrades here will give the team a very clear picture as to where its problems are and whether it’s addressing them effectively.
“With this week’s upgrade we should have a better understanding, I hope,” Leclerc said.
“For quite a long time we didn’t really know from where [the difference between Saturday and Sunday] was coming from. We start to understand from where it’s coming from and we are putting our effort in it.
“Barcelona is known for probably being the best track to understand exactly where you are with the car, so I think it’s really good to have this new upgrades here and to understand where are we and so we can confirm still our weaknesses.
“I think is a perfect track to see whether this upgrade is going in the right direction or not. “
STROLL IN NEED OF A BIG WEEKEND
While the spotlight was fully on Fernando Alonso in Monaco as the best-placed driver to beat Max Verstappen — a feat he so nearly achieved — teammate Lance Stroll was never even on for points, having qualified a lowly 14th and eventually crashing out of the race.
A starker contrast of fortunes was hard to find outside Red Bull Racing.
Stroll is yet to outqualify Alonso or beat him in a race. The only other driver with such a negative and one-sided intrateam record this year is rookie Logan Sargeant.
He’s also finishing on average 3.6 places behind Alonso. Only Sargeant has taken more of a walloping.
The 66-point gap between Stroll and Alonso is the largest of any teammate combination this season.
To be fair to the Canadian, his poor showing in Monaco qualifying was thanks to floor damage. There are also excuses to be made for Miami (bad qualifying gamble) and his DNF in Saudi Arabia (technical retirement from fourth).
“We had some tough weekends,” he said in Barcelona. “I think it‘s just how it goes. It’s good weekends and bad weekends. Like every other weekend, I’m just coming into this one trying to get the most out of it. We’ll see how it goes.”
But there’s also no doubt Alonso has been carrying the team so far this season.
Aston Martin leads Mercedes by just one point for second in the constructors standings with 120 points, 93 of which are Alonso’s.
If Stroll averaged one position behind Alonso this year, the team’s tally would be a much more comfortable 160 points — 41 ahead of Mercedes and 70 ahead of Ferrari.
Instead the team is vulnerable to dropping to third or even fourth in the constructors standings.
“[Alonso’s] been doing very well,” Stroll said when asked about his teammate’s consistent level of performance. “The results speak for themselves. He’s on top of his game and he’s enjoying driving the car. He’s physically fit, mentally in a great place.”
Questions will be asked eventually if Stroll can’t start pulling his weight. And they’ll be awkward questions for all involved given his father owns the team and his seat is seen, rightly or wrongly, as a position for life.
He doesn’t have to beat Alonso — surely no-one expects that of him — but he needs to start contributing to the team’s points haul to nip those questions in the bud.
HOW CAN I WATCH IT?
The Spanish Grand Prix is live and ad-break free in racing on Kayo Sports and Fox Sports.
First practice is at 9:30pm (AEST) on Friday followed by second practice at 1am Saturday.
Final practice is at 8:30pm on Saturday ahead of qualifying at midnight.
Pre-race coverage starts at 9:30pm, with lights out at the Spanish Grand Prix at 11pm.
