Red Bull tipped as team to beat in 2022 season by former F1 driver

Former F1 driver Stefan Johansson believes Red Bull will be the “team to beat” in 2022, despite the massive overhaul in technical regulations. He also believes Max Verstappen is well placed to defend his F1 title.

Speaking in a post-season interview with planetf1, the Swede said:

“With the drastic changes in aerodynamics for next season, Red Bull will probably be the team that gets closest to where it needs to be the fastest... We’ve seen that many times over the years. As soon as the rules change, you’ll have one, maybe two teams that have the resources and talent to get it right out of the gate. The rest spend the next three years catching up again.”

Johansson, who drove for many prestigious teams including Ferrari and McLaren between the mid-80s and the early 90s, believes the grid would have been tighter in 2022 if the regulations had stayed the same. The Swede also feels the top teams had reached the developmental ceiling with the current regulations. He said:

“The easiest way to even up the field and get close racing is rules stability. Eventually the smaller, less well-resourced teams will catch up.”

---

Legendary F1 designer Adrian Newey is Red Bull’s greatest asset

Red Bull’s chief technical officer, Adrian Newey, has a sterling reputation for interpreting new regulations exactly right. Throughout his three-decade-long F1 career, Newey has worked on around half-a-dozen regulation changes for multiple teams and has always delivered.

The last few times F1 introduced major regulation changes was in 2009 and 2014, and both times Red Bull brought out cars that were some of the fastest on the grid. While Brawn was the fastest out of the box in 2009 with their radical “double diffuser”, Newey went on to master the regulations by the end of the year, leading to Sebastian Vettel’s four-year-long dominance.

Meanwhile, the team’s 2014 challenger is often regarded as the superior chassis compared to the Mercedes W05. Saddled with Renault’s woefully underpowered and unreliable power unit, the Austrian team, however, were unable to exploit the chassis’ strengths.

In recent years following Mercedes' domination, Milton Keynes always maintained that they lacked a strong power unit partner to challenge for world championships rather than lacking in the aerodynamics and chassis departments. The team's claims were vindicated after their championship victory with Honda last season.