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A 2022 Formula 1 title fight that, pre-season, had the potential to be a three-way one soon became a two-horse race when the campaign got under way, before hopes of even that began to evaporate as Max Verstappen tightened his grip on a second crown.
So, how accurately did our 2022 predictions stand up come the end of the year?
We asked The Race’s writers to look back at the predictions they made on the eve of the Bahrain season opener in March and assess how well they judged the field – however difficult that process of reflection proved to be for them.
Who will be champion?
“Half-right or half-wrong?” asked Mark Hughes of his prediction that Verstappen would win the drivers’ title and Mercedes the constructors’.
“I was figuring another 2021-style close competition between Red Bull and Mercedes and of course we got nothing of the sort because of the tricky little ghost in the Brackley windtunnel which was keeping a secret not to be revealed until the car hit the track,” he said.
Among the others picking that combination were Glenn Freeman, who said “predicting Verstappen would get even better now he had a title under his belt wasn’t a massive reach”, and Josh Suttill, who “always felt Verstappen was going to take a step after winning his first drivers’ title just like Sebastian Vettel after 2010”.
“Much like in 2011, I expected rather more competition than what the reigning Red Bull world champions faced,” he added of Mercedes’ title bid failing to materialise.
One writer – Valentin Khorounzhiy – got both predictions right. By contrast, Matt Beer put his faith in the Charles Leclerc/Ferrari axis that started the season as the package to beat but faded as the year went on.
“OK, I was the only one of us who opted for romance and optimism here,” said Beer. “I was absolutely wrong to, but will definitely do the same again when we make 2023 predictions.”
Where will Mercedes finish?
Unsurprisingly, the eight-time constructors’ champion’s fall from the summit to third place, as it struggled to get a handle on its capricious W13, was something that caught most people out.
Mercedes’ porpoising issues were already known by the time these questions were put to our writers, but even then most expected it either to win or to get a grip on the problem quickly enough to be in the mix.
Beer pointed to that by saying “it’s really interesting looking back on this now to recall how long it took the idea of Mercedes really being in trouble to sink in for all of us”, feeling there wasn’t “anything illogical about that” given Mercedes’ sweep of 15 of the last 16 titles available. “It all felt reminiscent of watching Ferrari’s 2005: you kept waiting for the turnaround and resumption of normal service, and it just never came,” he said, having predicted Mercedes would come second.
“What we saw from the Hamilton/Russell combination suggests the logic of the driver line-up being strong enough to edge out Red Bull if the car was in the ballpark was correct,” added Freeman, one of three writers in this selection who expected Mercedes to win the title. “But it took the car all year to even find the directions to the ballpark.”
Suttill said he had been tricked by “years of false Mercedes pre-season crises” and that he thought it would “recover far more quickly than it did”, while Khorounzhiy conceded “Mercedes’ season caught me off guard”.
“In my defence, it was just really hard to believe it was really in this much trouble. ‘I definitely expect a stretch where its car is the best in the field’ was what I wrote – not technically incorrect, but I definitely wasn’t thinking of the stretch as being one weekend long.”
Hughes, another who put Mercedes top of his list, said he expected the Silver Arrows to come out on top because George Russell would be a stronger scorer than Sergio Perez.
“And that would decide both the drivers title in favour of Verstappen and the constructors in favour of Merc,” he said. “Wrong for all the right reasons!”
How many races will Russell win?
Tied in a considerable way to Mercedes’ expected level of performance, predictions of how many races Russell would win proved, by and large, well wide of the mark.
But he did at least tick the box with a composed performance in Brazil and showed the potential on multiple occasions to suggest more would have been on the cards with a more agreeable W13.
Hughes reckoned in those circumstances “George was gonna win six or seven, about the same as Max and Lewis”, while Suttill said “perhaps if the season started in Brazil I’d have been right?” about his prediction of five or six wins.
Freeman was another to go high pre-season – “maybe as many as five” – and stood by that prediction. “He certainly showed he was worthy of such lofty numbers if the car had been good enough,” he said. “At least he got one to banish the ghost of Sakhir 2020.”
Beer was closest to being right, having made “by far the most Russell-sceptical prediction”.
“That wasn’t due to a lack of faith in him as such, just maybe a legacy of having expected too much from too many rising stars over the last few decades – now I really want to see them thrive in a top team before being convinced,” he said.
He was deeply impressed by Russell’s campaign and, “regardless of the circumstances and mitigating factors”, it was “near-unbelievable” that Russell outscored Lewis Hamilton – “F1’s statistically greatest driver” – in their first seasons as team-mates.
How many teams will win races?
For anyone hoping the new rules era would level the competitive playing field, 2022 might have been a disappointment as the top-three teams regularly dominated the top six positions – even when Mercedes found itself adrift of Ferrari and Red Bull.
“A prediction I’m sad that I got right,” said Suttill. “Hopefully more teams will compete for a win in 2023.”
Freeman was another bang on the money in predicting only the big three would win, but he said “getting this right wasn’t much of an achievement”.
“It could take years to undo the unbalanced competitive picture between the big three and the rest,” he said.
Four of the seven contributors in our predictions piece went for more than three teams winning races. Hughes was one of them – he predicted five might succeed.
“I thought the rules reset might bring McLaren and/or Alpine closer and that there’d be inevitable clashes at the front between the Red Bulls and Mercedes,” he said. “Not inevitable if the Red Bull is half a minute up the road though, is it? Eh?”
Khorounzhiy predicted one outsider would join the winners’ circle but conceded pre-season that Ferrari being back at the front greatly decreased the odds of a shock winner.
“Nobody outside of the ‘big three’ could even dream of it,” he said on reflection.
“I probably expected a bit more reliability pain and set-up unpredictability for the leading trio to open up an opportunity, but even with Mercedes limping for much of the season the sheer pace difference between the haves and have-nots was extremely imposing, while the improved overtaking has made shock wins even more difficult.”
Who will have the better year – Alonso or Vettel?
This was the category in which our writers had most success – even if the question lends itself to some subjective interpretation.
Take out frustrations over the many retirements he suffered and the points that cost him – and the fact he’s trading Alpine for the Aston Martin team Sebastian Vettel has left now he’s retired from F1 – and Fernando Alonso did have the better year, as six of the seven writers predicted.
In pure statistical terms, his 14 points finishes to Vettel’s 10, a best finish of fifth compared to Vettel’s sixth, and ninth in the points vs Vettel’s 12th are emphatic. His two most outstanding qualifying performances, in Australia and Canada, came on weekends when Vettel was knocked out in Q1 amid Aston’s various struggles with its AMR22.
“This was such an obvious one. When is this man ever going to fade?” was Beer’s triumphant declaration.
“I expected Alonso to be let down by a poor car, and Vettel to shine in a good one. Apologies to Alpine!” said Freeman, who was the one outlier plumping for Vettel pre-season. “I also said they might both retire, so at least I got 50% of that right.”
But although Alonso was more consistently impressive, Hughes acknowledged “Vettel had some great moments too”. These included an excellent qualifying lap then recovery from an off into the gravel on lap one – caused by contact with Alonso – to sixth at Suzuka, and his charge back through a midfield pack he was comfortably at the head of until a botched pitstop to claim eighth at Austin.
Suttill, who picked Alonso before the season, considered the subjectivity of the question as he reflected on his predictions.
“Alonso may have outscored Vettel but who left 2022 with the ‘better’ year?” he asked. “The driver who fell out with and left Enstone for a third time? Or the one who had a glorified farewell parade with an increasingly competitive Aston, a run in Nigel Mansell’s FW14B, a Question Time appearance and plenty of adoration from fans who villainised him a decade ago?”
Who’ll be the most surprising intra-team duel victor?
Considering this was arguably the most open-ended question, it’s perhaps little surprise that there was limited success in our predictions.
Even those intra-team victories that might be considered a surprise come with caveats: Esteban Ocon beat Alonso but had two race retirements to his team-mate’s six, and a degree of Russell’s margin over Hamilton came earlier in the season when the seven-time world champion was more inclined to experiment on set-up, often for little return, to get around Mercedes’ issues.
Khorounzhiy did correctly predict the second of those outcomes though he acknowledged this was “not quite representative of their relative speed, but I’ll take it”.
Freeman, who ultimately thought Carlos Sainz could trump Leclerc at Ferrari, was disappointed he didn’t stick with his gut feeling. “I said at the time I nearly went for Russell beating Hamilton. Disappointed in my past self for not committing to that,” he said.
“As for Ferrari, Sainz did well, but Leclerc found that next level the superstars can access.”
Suttill and Hughes both thought 2022 would be, in Hughes’s words, “the year when Yuki Tsunoda steps it up and gives Pierre Gasly a hard time at AlphaTauri”.
Gasly still came out on top in their qualifying head-to-head and scored almost double the points of his team-mate in a difficult AT03, but Tsunoda was the more regular points threat in the second half of the season.
Hughes said that only happened “as Pierre seemed to get increasingly frustrated at the mediocre car AlphaTauri had given him”, while Suttill felt Tsunoda was “still nowhere near as consistent as Gasly and that cost him”.
On seeing his prediction that Mick Schumacher would beat Kevin Magnussen at Haas, Beer said simply: “Oh. Oops.”
Which team will finish last?
Only two team names turned up in our final pre-season prediction, and four of our writers ended up being correct in selecting Williams. Not that they were happy with the end result.
“I didn’t want to be right about this one,” said Hughes, while Suttill said “I worry this will be the same answer to this question for the next few years” – a sentiment likely to be shared by others not just because of the team’s 2022 result (it finished 27 points adrift at the foot of the table with just five top-10 finishes) but also because it headed into the winter rudderless following the departures of Jost Capito and Francois-Xaiver Demaison.
The other team predicted to take the wooden spoon by our writers was Alfa Romeo, which ended up clinging on (just) to sixth in the standings after starting the season in the mix at the front of the midfield before tailing off.
Freeman said he “had too much faith in Williams” in his deliberations, and Beer pointed to the poor pre-season Alfa experienced as his – and others’ – reason for selecting the Sauber-run team.
He said it was “interesting here how much some of us (including me) were swayed” by the tests at Barcelona and Bahrain, at which point “Alfa Romeo had looked a mess”.
“But it certainly didn’t when it actually mattered,” he added. “Which makes it all the more bizarre and surprising that it then went from that superb start to a long, long run of barely scoring.”
