Teams who get 2022 rules "badly wrong" won’t be “screwed”: Ferrari

Ferrari’s sporting director Laurent Mekies has disagreed with Mercedes technical chief James Allison’s claims that any team that gets the 2022 regulations “badly wrong” will have a horrible year. Mekies believes despite the cars being new, there is scope for teams to regain lost ground throughout the season.

When asked if a team could be “screwed” for the entire year if they arrive with a bad car at the start of the season, during an interview with GPFans, Mekies said:

“No. I don’t think you are screwed. You put the car on the ground, and you then start to check if you measure what you were hoping to measure. If not, you try to fix it, as you have done for the last 50 years or 40 years. It doesn’t matter if the car is new. We have had different shapes in the past. Even more now than 20 years ago, we are supposed to be able to simulate, to understand the flow, to understand how it is working.”

The 2022 technical regulations are some of the biggest ruleset ever introduced in the sport’s history and are expected to produce cars that are radically different from F1 cars of the recent past. Since the regulations are so vast, and cars so new, teams are expected to be on a steep learning curve to understand the new cars.

Combined with a budget cap that limits the number of upgrades a team can bring throughout the season, slow-starting teams are expected to have a hard time clawing back lost ground.

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Laurent Mekies reaffirms Ferrari’s limited 2022 development claims with F1’s decreasing budget cap

Laurent Mekies has revealed that in 2022, Ferrari might only be able to bring in a fraction of the number of upgrades it did in previous years owing to a shrinking budget cap. In saying so, the Frenchman reaffirmed claims made by Ferrari’s team principal Mattia Binotto late last month.

When asked about the team’s planned development cycle over the years, during an interview with GPFans, Mekies said:

“Not compared to 2021 because ‘21, obviously, there was near-zero [development], or at least, for us, very little. But if you go back to 2019, 2018, we think you will see fewer [developments] for sure. Those years, with the big teams, at every race, or at every other race, you had something on the car.”

To reign in top teams with vast resources and bring some semblance of equal opportunity to the sport, the FIA introduced a budget cap that limited teams spending to $145 million early last year. The budget cap further shrinks by $5 million every year until 2025.

This meant that top teams such as Mercedes, Ferrari, and Red Bull were unable to out-develop smaller teams, and each other, throughout the season using their vast resources, producing one of the most exciting seasons in F1’s history.