Although the second leg of the 2022 F1 race, Saudi Arabia, starts at 1:00 a.m. Beijing time, the wonderful bull-and-horse battle between Red Bull and Ferrari, which solves the reliability problem, makes fans sleepless, but what is Mercedes doing?
The opening red bull's double retreat left a lot of suspense inside and outside the paddock, whether their car was really too heavy, causing fuel to run out, or whether it was a reliability problem.
As Perez won pole position in Saudi Arabia, all doubts vanished and Master Pey also won the first pole position of his career, the first Mexican driver in history to achieve this achievement.
At the same time, Perez also surpassed Weber to become the driver with the most pole games in his first pole position, with a record of 215, compared with 130 games previously recorded by Weber.
However, the lucky balance of the main race was not in favor of Master Pey, or Ferrari's strategy was more advanced, after being tricked by Leclerc into the maintenance area, he did not expect the safety car to move, and the first three drivers who had originally stayed on the field entered the station, and after leaving the station, Perez fell to fourth place.
The reason why Ferrari's strategy online this year is more because the car is fast enough, which allows them to be more relaxed when implementing the strategy, but from the results, Ferrari's wave of deception has not taken too much advantage, because although Leclerc is in the lead after leaving the station, there is Verstappen behind them.
So we saw the offensive and defensive battle between Verstappen and Leclerc at the end of the race, and the similar to Bahrain Station is that the DRS detection area before the Saudi Station enters the big straight line of the departure area is the key to whether you can hold the position in the straight line, this time Verstappen summed up the experience of the previous stop, and finally firmly held the first place position.
Judging from the situation in the first two stops, the bull and horse war between Ferrari and Red Bull will continue this year, but look at Mercedes, who everyone thought had the strength to compete for the championship, what is the situation.
Hamilton can be said to have experienced a very disastrous Saudi race, first qualifying did not make it to Q2, and his regular performance was not smooth enough, and the car tuning seemed to be completely in the wrong direction.
Although the hard tire starting strategy was intended to give Hamilton the advantage of the tires in the middle of the race and thus catch up with some positions, the dispatch of the safety car disrupted their plans, and the drivers who started with neutral tires were replaced with newer hard tires in advance, and Hamilton struggled even more.
At the same time, when Hamilton needed to enter the station, Ricciardo's car failure at the entrance of the maintenance channel also forced him to run one more lap, and finally finished in tenth place, barely getting a point.
Fortunately, Russell's performance is not very crotch-pulling, but his car still can't catch up with Red Bull and Ferrari in the First Army. Two stops later, Ferrari's points in the constructors' standings have surpassed mercedes and Red Bull combined, of course, because Red Bull had problems in the first stop, and Mercedes really had to push harder.
Looking at the performance of Chinese driver Zhou Guanyu, Saudi Arabia does not seem to be as lucky as Bahrain station, the problem of starting power protection still exists, coupled with a slight collision with Ricciardo, he once again fell to the last place after the start.
Although Zhou Guanyu then struggled to catch up, but because of the vitality off the track when surpassing Alburn, he was punished for 5 seconds, but it was a coincidence that the staff in the maintenance area may be too nervous, and they first supported the jack when they could not move the car, which also led to Zhou Guanyu getting a second penalty, and finally he could only regret ranking 11th, and only one position away from the points zone.
The overall performance of the midstream team was not impressive, almost every team encountered reliability problems, Mick Schumacher had a serious accident in qualifying, fortunately, people were fine, and Hiroshi Kakuda of Little Red Bull also announced his retirement before the race. Bottas could have fought for more points for the team, but regrettably withdrew, but it is worth affirming that Alfa Romeo's car is very competitive this year.
The only attraction was the Alpine, the first half of the race shot almost all gave Ocon and Alonso infighting, the only two cars with Renault engines entertained themselves very happily, but it was still visible that the power unit was far inferior to Ferrari and Honda, and Alonso also withdrew due to mechanical failure.
The new season of F1 has only made two stops and is so exciting, it seems that this year's competition will have more things to see and highlight, don't miss it.
The author of this article is a kick car gang Lu Yu