“It might be quite painful,” Mercedes wary of wrong set-up in Imola

“It might be quite painful,” Mercedes wary of wrong set-up in Imola

The Imola Grand Prix

The latest season of Formula 1 has hit the road running and will host its fourth round at the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix in Italy. Going into this weekend the anticipations of each time are higher than a normal race weekend because of the limited running time before the Grand Prix. It comes as a consequence of being the inaugural sprint race weekend of the 2022 season. The sprint race weekend format was introduced in Formula 1 last year and has been a major addition to the calendar ever since.

It changes the format of the weekend drastically with Qualifying being hosted on Friday and a 100 km race on Saturday which determines the pole sitter for the Sunday’s race. However, in this season of Formula 1 there have been a number of rule changes for this format. The biggest change the sprint race weekend views is the points awarded for the top eight finishers in the 100 km race. The points available for each driver and team over the weekend change drastically as a result. The maximum a team can score this year comes out a total of whopping 59 points.

Mercedes focused on set up for sprint race in Imola

Mercedes at the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix
Mercedes at the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix

The sprint race weekend comes at an opportunity cost of 60 minutes for each time in the paddock as they lose valuable running time in form of a Free Practice session. Current season of Formula 1 is dictated by an alteration in rules and regulations, with each team being in a race for car development. The Mercedes track side engineering director, Andrew Shovlin expressed his view saying “If you consider the cars and the tyres we had last year, we understood them pretty well. We’re on very much a learning curve with the new cars and the tyres, so that Imola race is going to be difficult”.

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The Mercedes engineer further added “If you hit the ground running, you’re probably in for a good weekend. If you put the car on track and it’s a difficult one to deal with, it might be quite painful. There’s a lot of focus there on making sure we can get that start set-up in the right place”. This being the first sprint race weekend format of the season has a lot of unknowns and would see each team being tested on their potential to maximise the points score from the Imola Grand Prix.

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