F1’s longest season set to kick off after an eventful offseason
After the most dramatic offseason in recent Formula 1 history comes its longestever season.
This offseason, seventime champion Lewis Hamilton stunned the sport by announcing he is moving to Ferrari next year. The switch surprised his current team, Mercedes, and even his parents. Netflix star Guenther Steiner was removed from his role leading the Haas team.
It's been a lot for drivers and F1 fans to follow even before a marathon season begins.
All three of the current and former champions on the grid — Hamilton, Max Verstappen and Fernando Alonso — agree 24 races push the limits of what F1 drivers and team members can take.
“When I started we had 16 races,” twotime champion Alonso, who has a record 377 career race starts, said on Wednesday. “Now we are up to 24 and this is not sustainable for the future for anyone.”
Verstappen's Red Bull teammate Sergio Perez voiced concern for staff on
F1 teams who, he said, seemed exhausted at the final races of last year.
“I remember seeing a lot of zombies in Abu Dhabi, after Vegas,” he said Wednesday. “We are trying to basically put some points across that it’s not only for the drivers, to be honest. There’s a lot of mechanics, engineers and basically they travel the world weekend after weekend, a lot of hours on the planes."
The record season means an extended goodbye for Hamilton, who is leaving Mercedes at the end of the season to join Ferrari, and raised concerns over how the expanded calendar might worsen F1's impact on the environment.
Preseason testing last week at the same track in
Bahrain was twice disrupted by drain covers flying off and leaving debris across the track — prompting Verstappen to voice concerns over safety — but that problem has now been solved for now.
Rain isn't a major concern in Bahrain so problem drains at two corners have simply been filled in with concrete.
Modern F1 cars' powerful groundeffect aerodynamics generate grip between the floor and the track surface but that force can also pull loose items away from the ground. Carlos Sainz Jr.’s Ferrari was badly damaged by a water valve cover in practice for the Las Vegas Grand Prix in November, underlining the risks to drivers.