Over one third of the 2022 Formula 1 grid is heading for a new employer, or out of F1, after the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix weekend.
That makes this one of the busiest winters for driver changes, and one of the most surprising and controversial given how events that led to Fernando Alonso arriving at Aston Martin, Daniel Ricciardo departing McLaren (and F1, for 2023 at least), and Oscar Piastri making his debut with McLaren not Alpine all unfolded.
Sebastian Vettel heading for a well-deserved retirement was one of the few serene elements of the silly season.
Which of the seven partnerships that are ending can be proud of what they achieved, and which are best dissolved and forgotten?
Here’s our assessment of them:
Vettel in F1 – and at Aston Martin
The main things Sebastian Vettel has brought to Aston Martin are his experience, calmness and professionalism. The team has struggled for performance over the last two seasons, especially this year with the new regulations, and having the boss’s son in the other car could leave it questioning where it really stands in the pecking order.
As we have seen on many occasions, when given the tools needed to do the job Vettel can bring home points. But he hasn’t had those tools very often and when he has, sometimes luck has not been on his side.
He is only 11th in the drivers’ championship with 36 points, which is no great shakes for a four-time world champion with 53 wins under his belt. But his team-mate is 16th with only 14 points and no wins on his CV.
Vettel has been non-confrontational when things haven’t gone as well as they might have. And I believe that with very little hope of a potential race-winning drive that retirement is the right thing for him. He doesn’t get a kick from simply driving around in circles and has nothing left to prove.
Next year, things on that side of the garage could be very different. – Gary Anderson
Alonso’s third Enstone coming
Never go back, as the saying goes. But Fernando Alonso has done that not once, but twice to the Enstone team where he won back-to-back world championships in 2005/06. His third coming is not ending well, with Alonso stating in Brazil that his main objective now is “to go to Abu Dhabi and test the green car” – a reference to his imminent move to Aston Martin.
Both his second and third stints at the team were the result of unusual circumstances. He went back for 2008-09 when he walked away from McLaren after one season, effectively keeping himself warm until Ferrari came calling. This time round, he’d spent two years out of F1 and Alpine was the best-available avenue to return to F1.
It’s been a qualified success for team and driver. Alonso has proved himself more than capable of cutting it in F1 and in the process delivered consistently on track for Alpine. Without Alonso, it may not have finished fourth in the 2022 constructors’ championship – a position that’s not yet mathematically secured but that only a miracle would allow McLaren to grab.
But it’s not ending well and Abu Dhabi is now little more than a mutual obligation to be discharged before both move on into 2023. – Edd Straw
Gasly at AlphaTauri/Red Bull
Pierre Gasly makes no bones about it; without the 10-year Red Bull deal he signed covering 2014-23 – one he’s been bought out of by Alpine a year early – it’s unlikely he’d have made it so far. For all the bad memories of his brief Red Bull Racing stint in 2019, it will be a largely fond farewell for him when he starts his 108th and final race under Red Bull’s wing in Abu Dhabi.
His 11-race stint with the main Red Bull team in 2019 aside, it’s been a successful period for Gasly. Even that created an opportunity for him to show his mental strength by bouncing back from a blow that many would have taken a long time to recover from. Just over a year after being relegated to what was then called Toro Rosso, he won the Italian Grand Prix.
While Gasly fell short of joining Sebastian Vettel, Max Verstappen and Daniel Ricciardo as drivers who rode the Red Bull wave to become serial winners in F1, he still fared better than most. And he did something none of the others did by becoming a long-term lynchpin for what’s now called AlphaTauri by spending the best part of five seasons there.
Red Bull in F1 will always be a dream not-quite-fulfilled for Gasly. But while he never conquered the world for the company, he bagged second prize of a long stint at racing’s top table and earned himself a move to Alpine. – ES
Ricciardo at McLaren
What began with Daniel Ricciardo claiming he had the best chance of his career to become Formula 1 world champion is ending one year before the first contract was even meant to expire.
Off-track, Ricciardo and McLaren have looked a good fit. There has never been a real indication of any rift there, Ricciardo’s professionalism has been exemplary even as things have got difficult, and there’s no doubt he has been a good motivating force at McLaren – and probably nudged its processes along after so much experience at a top squad such as Red Bull, and even Renault.
But it has emphatically failed on-track, with the obvious exception of his win in Italy last year.
That result means the McLaren/Ricciardo union will always have a standout moment of glory. But Monza 2021 also acts as a totem of all the promise that it started with, and the magic it could never capture thereafter.
It’s sad to see what had all the ingredients to be an extremely popular and successful era end prematurely this weekend. But we’ve had a very long time to come to terms with it, as it has looked increasingly likely over the last year. – Scott Mitchell-Malm
Schumacher at Haas
The tone of polite irritation and injustice in Mick Schumacher’s statements and interviews after his Haas exit announcements made it obvious he feels his first two seasons in F1 have been successful – or at least, promising – enough that he should get a third.
Based on his peaks, he has a point. He gave Haas pretty much all its reasons to smile as it ground through 2021 with an undeveloped car and two rookie drivers, one of them turning out conspicuously slower and harder to work with than the other.
Kevin Magnussen was a tougher opponent for Schumacher than Nikita Mazepin, though. But also an opponent that a true rising F1 star really ought to have a better record against.
Too many crashes, too many of them coming in situations that really shouldn’t have ended in crashes (like the Suzuka practice in-lap), too many unpredictable losses of pace, gave Haas too many concerns over whether Schumacher could ever deliver his best form reliably.
He’s done enough to show he’s worth another chance one day in a different environment, but not done enough to ensure it would be any kind of travesty if that never happened. While there have certainly been much worse F1 careers than Mick Schumacher’s, two points finishes in two years in a car that was a fairly regular points contender in the second of those seasons isn’t what you’d hope for from someone arriving in F1 as an F2 and F3 champion. – Matt Beer
Latifi at Williams
Nicholas Latifi will bow out of Williams – and possibly F1 – having established himself as little more than a footnote in the history of the team. Yet by notching up his 61st start in Abu Dhabi he will break into the top 10 of most world championship races for the team – ahead of Alan Jones, no less.
The Canadian has notched up just nine points in his three seasons for Williams, which considering the team has managed just 31 in that period is solid enough. He’s had the misfortune to be measured against F1’s newest grand prix winner, George Russell, then a resurgent Alex Albon this year. And, most painful of all, that one race alongside stand-in Nyck de Vries when he was outperformed.
But Latifi can hold his head up high. He showed flashes of genuine speed in F1, unfortunately rarely stringing weekends together and usually ending up near the back. But he was only the last classified finisher eight times, showing he was far from hopeless.
He worked hard, conducted himself well and was a popular member of the team, but while he wasn’t able to make an impact he proved himself a perfectly competent F1 driver. And that puts him well above many to have tried their luck at this level, even if it makes him the weakest performer among the current crop. – ES
Piastri at Alpine
Alpine may be quite glad to see the back of a driver it believes snubbed the team after all it did for him (short of actually arranging the contract he was promised on time), and Oscar Piastri’s probably relieved to escape an environment he had started to feel undervalued in so that he can start afresh elsewhere.
Piastri owes a lot to Renault and Alpine, no matter how awkward the last few months may have been.
Any animosity or tension that emerged after his desire to join McLaren emerged during the summer came at a detriment to a relationship that had been getting stronger since the end of 2019.
Piastri learned a lot as a Renault junior, gradually gaining more opportunities from shadowing the F1 team to driving on the simulator to getting a good private testing programme this year in a 2021 car.
It was all with a view to preparing Piastri for his F1 debut next year, although the original plan was with Williams until Alpine realised Fernando Alonso was leaving so it wanted Piastri itself.
In a literal sense that has been an obvious success in terms of Piastri’s development and Renault’s support of an F1-level talent. He is a better driver than the one who joined the programme and he will step up to F1 next year.
But the relationship has been a failure in one big, obvious way. Piastri won’t just make his first step into F1 not with Alpine – he’ll do so completely severing his ties and with bridges probably burned on both sides. – SMM
