From one partisan race to another, Formula 1 travels from Zandvoort to Monza for the Italian Grand Prix.
For the first time since the pandemic, the grandstands will be heaving with Ferrari tifosi eager to see the red cars do them proud on home turf.
The only problem is that Ferrari isn’t favourite. Far from it.
Max Verstappen is romping to the championship in part because of his car’s performances on tracks like Monza, where top speed pays big dividends.
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Ferrari fans are far more likely to see the Dutchman, not Charles Leclerc or Carlos Sainz, take the top step of the podium — perhaps a touch ironic given Verstappen has never finished higher than fifth at Monza, never mind mounting the podium.
Ferrari’s first mission will be to beat Mercedes, which feels like it’s on the road to recovery despite its continued patchy results. The German marque also has reservations about its form here, but whereas Ferrari appears baffled by its months-long underperformance, Mercedes at least feels as though it’s making progress.
McLaren will be meanwhile hoping to recapture a little of last year’s Monza magic, at least insofar as it needs to start scoring points against Alpine for fourth in the standings.
Meanwhile, with only seven rounds remaining, two drivers will be get a practice opportunity to sell their wares to the still roiling driver market before the final seats are snapped up.
WILL FERRARI SUFFER MORE HOME HEARTBREAK?
Formula 1 will welcome back a packed house at Monza for the first time since 2019, and with Ferrari enjoying a relatively successful season, the grandstands of the famous circuit will be heaving.
But ‘relative’ is the key word here, because just how successful a year this is for Ferrari is very much up for debate.
While points lost through strategic and driver error and unreliability have cost shots at the teams and drivers championships, in recent months the SF-75 has been surprisingly off the pace compared to its early-season form.
It means the team arrives home not simply out of the title fight but also in a demoralising form slump
“My main concern is that it has been three races in a row where we do not have the pace on Sunday,” Ferrari boss Mattia Binotto said.
“In the race itself we are not competitive enough, which makes life certainly a lot more difficult, not only because we cannot fight for the win with Max but because we do not have the pace to keep the Mercedes behind.
“We are not at what should be our potential. This is something we need to address as soon as possible, because there are a few races left from now until the end of the season.
“We are still looking for victories, and our intention is to win at every single race, including Monza.”
But in a significant bout of irony, if you were targeting any circuit for a Ferrari comeback win, it would never be its home race in Monza.
The circuit is all about maximum power and minimum downforce — that is, all about Red Bull Racing and not at all about Ferrari and its draggy car that eats up corners but lags on the straights.
“I think it’s going to be a bit of a difficult weekend, on paper at least,” Charles Leclerc admitted. “We expect Red Bull to be stronger. The track characteristics do not fit exactly our car.
“We are slower down the straights the main trend this year is straight-line speed. We seem to be a bit quicker in the corners, but tracks like here, it’s not enough to gain back from the straights.”
It left the Monegasque hoping that the car’s inexplicable performance downturn might similarly inexplicably right itself for the weekend.
“We’ve had some good and bad surprises this year. Maybe this one’s one of the good ones and we overperform compared to what we expect.”
That probably won’t be the case for Carlos Sainz at least, who the Italian media have reported will take a grid penalty for taking new power unit parts. It’ll at least mean the fans will see a Ferrari car making some passes, though overtaking is difficult enough here that a full-scale recovery is unlikely.
HAS MERCEDES LEARNT ITS BELGIUM LESSONS?
If there’s any potential silver lining for Ferrari, it’s that Mercedes is also bracing for a more difficult weekend than last week’s Dutch Grand Prix given the W13 is similarly maladapted to the high-speed Monza track.
Low downforce tracks have become a Mercedes weakness. The car’s has a deleterious tendency to bottom out when fully loaded at the end of long straights thanks to its low ride height, which forces the team to make set-up compromises.
This was particularly bad in Belgium, where the bumpiness of the track forced the team to increase its ride height to avoid damaging the car or wearing the plank, which in turn forced it to use larger rear wings to compensate for the lost downforce.
Because of the extra drag that generated on the straights, the car was around two seconds off the pace in qualifying.
But speaking in the team’s regular post-race debrief video, trackside engineer Andrew Shovlin said he was optimistic the team had learnt enough from its painful weekend in Spa to expect a better result in Italy.
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“Fundamentally the aerodynamics of the car will be very similar,” he said. “You will have seen in Spa we definitely struggled particularly on a single lap, and we’ve identified some areas in terms of where we have taken the car to in its development that make it difficult to run it in its optimum condition at those tracks.
“We can run smaller wings, but if we run smaller wings, we get a bit less downforce, and we are optimistic that some of the specific problems we had in Spa overt the bumps shouldn’t affect us. So we think we can get the car in a better working window.
“It is difficult to say exactly where we will be, but probably not as strong as we were in Zandvoort but hopefully nowhere near as difficult as it was in Spa.
“However, the Red Bull does look very efficient. It’s fast on the straights and it’s quick in the corners, and those problems seem bigger for us when we go to the low downforce tracks.”
But just as Sainz is set to serve an engine penalty, Mercedes will also take a hit, with Lewis Hamilton starting from the back of the grid with a new power unit.
Hamilton had hoped to get to the end of the season without having to take a new engine, but his airborne crash on the first lap of the Belgian Grand Prix did so much damage to that power unit that the team isn’t confident it can be used again safely, sending him to the tail end of the field for the start of Sunday’s race.
It’ll therefore be up to George Russell to make the most of whatever pace Mercedes can extract this weekend.
CAN McLAREN RECAPTURE THE MONZA MAGIC?
Alpine stretched its advantage over McLaren for fourth in the constructors standings to 24 points, continuing the gradual inching open of that gap in recent months towards what feels like an inexorable conclusion.
The story of this battle has been McLaren’s struggle to find consistency against the relentless French outfit. The Alpine seems to work everywhere, but the MCL36 turns up only occasionally, and when it does find a circuit it likes, it only draws level rather than taking an outright advantage.
Generally speaking the McLaren tends not to like low-downforce, high-speed circuits. The car is draggy and lacks performance on the straights; instead it prefers tracks with flowing medium or high-speed bends.
On paper this will be another damaging race for McLaren’s hopes of bridging that gap to fourth, with the team having struggled at recent similar circuits in Canada and Belgium.
But the other part of the equation is that McLaren isn’t making the most of its opportunities, with Daniel Ricciardo not matching Lando Norris for points this season.
“We have a strong point that we manage to score with both cars,” Esteban Ocon said. “At the moment that’s not what‘s happening on the other side.
“This is where we have an asset.”
But the spectre of last year’s Italian Grand Prix has muddied the waters somewhat.
While the declining McLaren of this year is a far cry from the team that looked in the ascendancy last season, it’s enough to put a question mark over the expected balance of performance this weekend, particularly given it was Ricciardo who fired up most when the opportunity to win the race arose.
There’s also the fact that Monza is an outlier on the calendar in terms of its extreme low-downforce demands, which has occasionally produced counterintuitive results.
“McLaren won last year,” Ocon said. “They were flying, and they won on merit, because they clearly had the pace. So we expect them to be to be strong again this weekend.
“We can‘t pronounce ourselves too early because we don’t know where the other cars are going to be.
“As I said, the trend seems to be for us this year that we perform better on lower downforce circuits, but we need to see. We need to assess where we are on Friday and on ourselves.
“We should perform well looking at how it was in Spa and on the lower downforce [tracks], but it‘s a very different circuit.
“We are going focus on what we know and pray that they are not as fast as they were last year.”
There’s a limited number of tracks left on the calendar that should work in McLaren’s favour. If it’s going to close the gap to fourth, it needs to start making inroads, and rekindling some of that Monza magic might be the best way to begin the process.
CAN ANY 2023 DRIVER PROSPECTS MAKE THEIR MARK?
As the silly season attempts to draw to a close — though with the FIA still to play a role in which pieces fall where — two drivers will have a rare chance this weekend to insert themselves into the conversation.
The first is Mercedes reserve and Formula E champion Nyck de Vries, whose name has been floating through the driver market all season.
Aston Martin will give the Dutchman his third FP1 run of the year, following on from Williams in Spain and Mercedes in France.
“It will be my third FP1 session of the season, and in the third different Formula 1 chassis, and these opportunities have given me a fantastic insight into how Formula 1 cars and teams function and operate,” De Vries noted.
Aston Martin has no available seats next season, making it a somewhat curious move, but team principal Mike Krack said he hoped it would play a role in securing him a seat.
“His achievements show that he clearly deserves a shot at Formula 1, and hopefully this opportunity to get behind the wheel of the AMR22 will allow him to showcase his abilities to the wider world.”
De Vries remains linked to Williams, where the team is weighing up whether to promote Logan Sargeant from F2 or to extend terms with Nicholas Latifi for another season — or potentially induct De Vries — as a stopgap measure.
Antonio Giovinazzi will be in action at Haas this weekend during FP1, with the Italian conducting the first of his two practice outings with the team despite not qualifying as a junior driver.
Giovinazzi is thought to be an outside chance at best to usurp Mick Schumacher, with his practice outings understood to be down more to maintaining the team’s relationship with Ferrari. That’ll be particularly important if Schumacher is to be dropped for a non-Ferrari-backed driver in 2023.
However, with so much uncertainty in the market, a strong performance this weekend and again in the US could keep some doors ajar.
