F1 news LIVE: Australian Grand Prix build-up as Ferrari expect ‘significant’ power increase

Ferrari will increase the power of their engine after the Miami Grand Prix, according to reports.

The Scuderia have made a sensational start to the 2022 season, currently leading the drivers’ and constructors championships.

They secured a one-two finish in the opening race of the season in Bahrain as Charles Leclerc claimed victory ahead of Carlos Sainz. The following weekend in Saudi Arabia they also impressed as Leclerc clinched second and Sainz third.

But according to Formu1a.uno they have still not shown the full potential of their power unit and plan to do so as the season progresses.

“The engineers say it quietly, but Ferrari is sure to be the engine manufacturer that has recovered the most power compared to last season, despite the introduction of E10 fuels,” the report states.

“It seems [Mattia] Binotto’s team is then also playing strategy, not wanting to show the true power of their unit this early in the season.”

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Mercedes won’t be looking at a dramatic turnaround in race No.3 of the 2022 Formula One season, according to Toto Wolff.

The boss has been disappointed by the team’s showings at both Bahrain and Saudi Arabia - despite standing second in the constructor championship at present, Mercedes have been well off the pace in both races.

They are ahead of Red Bull only by virtue of their opening-raceday issues, with Max Verstappen roaring back to win last time out while George Russell placed fifth and Lewis Hamilton came home in 10th.

It’s a far cry from the regular victories and podium finishes during last year’s epic title fight, and there’s still more pain to come in the short term, says Wolff.

“We are in a learning race and the first two weekends have shown we still have plenty to learn,” he said.

“At the moment, our track performance is not meeting our own expectations, but everyone at Brackley and Brixworth is focused on understanding the problems and finding the right solutions.

“There won’t be a magic fix for the next race weekend, but we’re pushing to steadily bring gains over the upcoming races, to hopefully move us closer to the front of the pack.

“Until then, we need to maximise each opportunity and make the most of the package we have.”

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Australian driver Daniel Ricciardo has said a points finish at his home race this weekend would “feel like a win”.

The McLaren team have struggled in the opening two races of the 2022 season in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

Both Ricciardo and Lando Norris finished outside the points in the season opener, before Norris’ seventh place earned the team their first top-10 in Saudi Arabia, as Ricciardo failed to finish the race.

And while winning the Australian GP continues to elude the Perth-born driver, he insists scoring points would feel like a victory given where the team is currently at.

Speaking to GP Fans, he said: “Maybe we will be lucky and fight for points. I know we’re not aiming very high with that, but that’s the only thing we can go for at the moment.

“Until we get major updates to the car, I think any place in the top ten feels like a win. Lando and I felt in Jeddah that the car felt a lot better.

“It doesn’t feel bad, we just need a bit more grip and downforce. That’s encouraging. I don’t think we are out of the race, we just need to find improvements.”

More on the Aussie’s excitement to be back on home soil:

Fernando Alonso’s career moves and downturns in fortunes may stem from struggling to cope with the emergence of Lewis Hamilton.

That’s the opinion of Heikki Kovalainen, who - like Alonso - was teammate to the Brit in his early years.

The Finn partnered Hamilton in 2008 and 2009 at McLaren, while Alonso did so one year previous - Hamilton’s rookie year in F1.

A spate of disagreements and an eventual exit followed for the Spaniard, who has since meandered from Renault to Ferrari, McLaren, out of F1 altogether and then back with Alpine since last year. And Kovalainen thinks that initial tough run alongside Hamilton has had a lasting impact.

“Since [Alonso’s] championship years with Renault he’s always made the wrong move and just sometimes I wonder if the trigger was the surprise of Hamilton’s speed,” he said to TalkSport.

“If that is the core issue, then the falling out with [McLaren boss] Ron Dennis and with the team followed and there wasn’t any other place to go, Renault was kind of on a downward slope, he was just playing catch up after that and that never really recovered.”

On staying the pace with Hamilton, Kovalainen acknowledges it’s a tough ask to do across the entirety of a year, requiring the very best drivers to show not just technique but also consistency to do so.

“Occasionally I could match him but over the full season I had to stretch every session to match him.

“You can only do so much stretching and then you run out of energy and that was the case with me, I didn’t have enough margin in my capacity to do the times and the races that he did, so it was not easy.

“His level of performance is so high that even for super talents like Max [Verstappen] it requires a lot of effort, a lot of focus, a lot of energy, so it’s not going to be easy, not everyone can handle that, it’s as simple as that.”

Helmut Marko says he hopes Carlos Sainz improves his race speed somewhat this year, as Red Bull need him to take points off Ferrari teammate Charles Leclerc.

Two podium spots in the opening races of the season have shown the power of the new car and the ability of the Spaniard, but it’s Leclerc who won the opener in Bahrain and then was locked in a battle with Max Verstappen in Jeddah.

Marko says there’s more to come from Sainz and it’s something the Red Bull racing team might actually need.

“I was pleasantly surprised last year that he [Sainz] was on the same level as Leclerc, and I was actually hoping that it would be the same this year,” Marko, Red Bull’s advisor, told Formel1.de.

“But you could already see it in the tests, and you could also see it in the race, that he’s missing about three to four-tenths.

“And that is a disadvantage for us because we believed that the two [Ferrari drivers] would take points away from each other. That is not the case at the moment.”

Ferrari lead the constructor standings at this early stage, with 78 points. Mercedes have 38 and Red Bull, third, have 37.

Formula 1’s introduction of the sprint races were a new innovation brought in at the start of the 2021 season.

A handful of races were given the go-ahead so that qualifying would take place on the Friday rather than the Saturday.

The sprint race would then replace qualifying on the Saturday, before the race took place as usual on the Sunday.

Last season the sprint races were at the British Grand Prix, the Italian Grand Prix, and the Brazilian Grand Prix.

Here is all you need to know about the sprint races for 2022.

Race stats, part 1 courtesy of Reuters:

Lap distance: 5.275km. Total distance: 305.950km (58 laps)

The most recent race at Albert Park was in 2019 and the circuit has been shortened by 28 metres since, with two turns taken out and seven corners modified. It is now considered a new layout.

Start time: 0500 GMT (1500 local)

No Australian driver has ever won a home grand prix.

There have been 13 Australian F1 drivers since 1950 and two world champions -- Jack Brabham and Alan Jones. McLaren’s Daniel Ricciardo is the only Australian in Sunday’s race.

This year’s race will be the 25th to be held at Albert Park, and 36th Australian Grand Prix. It was held in Adelaide, as the final race of the year, between 1985 and 1995.

Four current drivers have won before in Melbourne and three are world champions: Lewis Hamilton (2008, 2015), Sebastian Vettel (2011, 2017, 2018) and Fernando Alonso (2006). The odd man out is Valtteri Bottas, winner for Mercedes in 2019.

Aston Martin’s Vettel is starting his season this weekend after missing the first two races due to COVID-19.

Hamilton has been on pole in Melbourne for the last six editions and eight times in total (2008, 2012, 2014 to 2019), a record for the race.

The lowest starter to win was Britain’s Eddie Irvine from 11th in 1999 for Ferrari. Fifteen of the 24 races in Melbourne have been won from the front row.

Lewis Hamilton is braced for more misery in Melbourne after his Mercedes team ruled out any major upgrades for this weekend’s Australian Grand Prix.

Hamilton has already been cast 29 points adrift in the championship race after he finished only 10th at the second round in Saudi Arabia a fortnight ago.

Mercedes have dominated the sport since 2014 – carrying Hamilton to six titles and winning an unprecedented eight constructors’ championships in succession.

But Hamilton and new British team-mate George Russell have all but written off their aspirations unless Mercedes can radically improve their underperforming car.

Mercedes’ season has been derailed by ‘porpoising’ – the phenomenon seen this year when the car violently bounces on its suspension at high speed.

The problem caught Mercedes completely off guard, and Russell said it is the source of 99 per cent of the team’s problems.

Race stats for Melbourne, part 2 from Reuters:

Race wins

Hamilton has a record 103 career victories from 290 starts, the most recent being in Saudi Arabia last December.

Ferrari have won 239 races since 1950, McLaren 183, Mercedes 124, Williams 114 and Red Bull 76.

Ferrari have made their best start to a season since 2004.

Pole

Hamilton has a record 103 career poles, most recently qualifying fastest in Saudi Arabia last year.

Points

Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc is 12 points clear of team mate Carlos Sainz after two races. Sainz has finished the last 17 races in the points.

Haas have scored in successive races for the first time since 2019.

Aston Martin and Williams have yet to score a point in 2022.

Milestones

Mercedes are chasing their 125th win in Formula One.

Four drivers are racing in Australia for the first time -- Nicholas Latifi (Williams), Mick Schumacher (Haas), Yuki Tsunoda (AlphaTauri) and Guanyu Zhou (Alfa Romeo).

Two years after the Australian Grand Prix was scrapped due to COVID-19 hours before the first practice, Formula One returns Down Under to an upgraded Albert Park and a warm welcome from local fans starved of elite motor sport through the pandemic.

Plenty has changed since Valtteri Bottas won the 2019 race for Mercedes in Melbourne, kicking off another season dominated by former team mate Lewis Hamilton and the Silver Arrows.

In its first upgrade in a quarter of a century, Albert Park has been re-surfaced and had corners removed to encourage passing and hopefully put an end to processional race-days.

Mercedes and Hamilton, meanwhile, have fallen off their perch, leaving Ferrari and Red Bull the talk of the paddock after the season-opening swing through Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

The Ferrari car’s early strength and the budding rivalry between Charles Leclerc and Red Bull’s world champion Max Verstappen has motor sport pundits raving.

Whether it is renewed interest in the series or just a spell of balmy autumn weather, fans thronged to Albert Park on Thursday and bumper crowds are tipped through the weekend in a city which spent some 260 days locked down through the pandemic.

“The drivers are smiling, fans are smiling and the weather gods are smiling on us,” Australian Grand Prix Corporation boss Andrew Westacott told Reuters.

“It’s a much, much quicker circuit and I expect it’s going to produce great racing on the weekend.”

Many fans will hope that means more duelling between Dutchman Verstappen and fellow 24-year-old Leclerc, whose battles lit up the Middle Eastern double-header.

Verstappen, who had a non-finish at Bahrain but bounced back a winner in Saudi Arabia, said he would prefer to avoid going wheel-to-wheel with Leclerc by driving an improved car.

“For the viewers, it’s good,” he said on Thursday of their rivalry which dates back to their go-karting days.

“Of course I enjoy the battles but I’m also more focused on actually trying to make the car better and to get a better feeling in the car, and then hopefully we don’t need to battle in every single race.”

Verstappen said Red Bull had made “little steps” developing their car since Jeddah but stopped short of tipping a big weekend in Melbourne.

“We’ll do our best but at the moment we don’t know how the car’s going to perform,” he said.

Mercedes might also fall into that camp, having produced a car that bounces, or ‘porpoises’, on the straights as downforce comes and goes.

After Hamilton finished 10th in Jeddah and his new team mate George Russell came fifth, the team are 40 points behind Ferrari, and just one clear of Red Bull who suffered dual retirements in Bahrain.

Team boss Toto Wolff warned there would be no “magic fix” for the W13 car’s troubles in time for Sunday’s race.

“But we’re pushing to steadily bring gains over the upcoming races, to hopefully move us closer to the front of the pack.”

Four-times world champion Sebastian Vettel may be grateful just to be racing, after missing the first two rounds due to a positive COVID-19 test.

The Aston Martin driver’s seat was filled by Nico Hulkenberg but he makes his return in Melbourne, hoping to notch his team’s first points of the season.