The 2022 championship fight has been straightforward in every way its predecessor season wasn’t, with the racing on track largely uncontroversial and the aggro of 2021 almost entirely absent, with only the cost cap fracas briefly disturbing the peace.
But that only rings true if you look exclusively at the battle up front.
Just behind the frontrunning pack, the battle for fourth has is anything but quiet.
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McLaren and Alpine have been engaged in a year-long battle of swinging momentum on track and ruthless politicking off it.
There are millions of dollars at stake in the battle for fourth in the constructors championship, but as if that wasn’t enough to motivate these fallen grandees of Formula 1, the Oscar Piastri unpleasantness set the entire thing on fire in the middle of the year.
It’s no longer just about money. Now it’s all about pride.
After briefly losing hold of fourth after the Singapore Grand Prix, Alpine has re-established a slender lead of just seven points, the tally standings at 153-146.
But in such a fraught battle, McLaren fans might be tempted to think their team is fighting with one arm tied behind its back.
While Lando Norris has continued to operate at the consistently high level he set for himself last year, Daniel Ricciardo has fallen further off the pace in 2022.
We know the story by now. The Aussie hasn’t been able to match his driving style with the way the car wants to be driven, and the situation has become so forlorn that he’s leaving the team at the end of the year.
Whether he exits having helped the team to fourth in the standings or leaving himself open to being scapegoated for a demotion to fifth is potentially in his hands.
Ricciardo is sitting with 35 points to Norris’s 111. If he’d been as closely matched with Lando as the Alpine teammates are to one another in terms of points scored, he’d have amassed approximately 95 points — 60 more than his current total, bringing McLaren to 206 in total.
That boosted tally would give McLaren a 53-point lead — and that’s without adjusting other places as a result of shuffling Ricciardo further up the classification for almost every race, which would blow that gap out even further.
With only two races to go, the battle for fourth would be as good as decided.
But is it really that simple?
ALPINE’S LACK OF RELIABILITY EXPOSED
But let’s delve a little deeper into this hypothetical, because the battle isn’t nearly as clean-cut as saying Ricciardo has simply let McLaren down.
Unreliability has caused Alpine immense trouble through the year, and Fernando Alonso has very reluctantly borne the brunt of it.
He came close to a Renault engine-size blow-up after retiring from the Mexico City Grand Prix last time out, having run seventh ahead of teammate Esteban Ocon before his car ground to a halt with a cylinder failure for his fifth retirement of the season.
“I think [from] 19 races, [in] more or less 50 per cent of the races we haven’t scored the points we deserve,” he said frustratedly.
“I think I lost 60 points this year … and obviously all the others benefit so everyone scores two more than what they should.
“My level is at the highest of the season at the moment and the results and the standings at the end of the year will be one of the lowest.”
Despite the high emotion of the moment and the Spaniard’s infamous ability to talk himself up, his arithmetic was remarkable accurate.
He’s been afflicted by bad luck in 10 of the season’s 20 races so far. Seven of them have been technical problems and a further three were either team errors or crashes not of his own making.
Saudi Arabia, Italy, Singapore and Mexico City: Sunday engine failures cost him approximately 34 points based on where he’d have finished.
Emilia-Romagna: Mick Schumacher crashed him out of a likely four points.
Australia: a hydraulics failure while vying for pole cost him at least four points on Sunday.
Spain: a team miscommunication meant he was knocked out in Q1, costing him at least one place in the final reckoning worth two points.
Canada: an engine problem dropped him from fourth down to a penalised ninth, a difference of 10 points.
Austria: an electrical problem meant he couldn’t start the sprint, costing him two points on Saturday and a likely additional seven on Sunday.
United States: he had the pace for sixth ahead of Norris before Lance Stroll launched him into a massive crash, a difference worth two points.
That adds up to 65 points lost through no fault of his own. Ocon can claim another 11 points all through technical problems.
It’s a whopping 76 points lost through poor execution, unreliability and some bad luck.
McLaren, on the other hand, could claim six points in total for Ricciardo’s engine failures in Saudi Arabia and Italy and arguably another one from Norris’s crash in the Miami Grand Prix — a total of seven lost points.
A reminder: Alpine leads McLaren 153-146 in the standings.
But our hypothetical standings suggest that should read 229-213 in Alpine’s favour for a slightly larger difference of 16 points.
Ricciardo might be costing his team a chance to capitalise on Alpine’s problems, but he’s certainly not to blame for the team being fifth in the standings on pure pace.
Bagnaia wraps up 2022 World Championship | 01:08
WHY HAS ALPINE STRUGGLED SO BADLY?
Alpine and the Renault engine division have built unreliability into its 2022 program on purpose, strange though it is to say.
In all but a few seasons since the current turbo-hybrid power unit was introduced in 2014, the Renault motor has been the slowest on the grid, with only Honda’s false start with McLaren temporarily saving the French constructor some blushes.
With a four-year engine development freeze commencing this year, the French constructor decided to target one final aggressive update for the 2022 season to try to haul itself up the power stakes.
It came with the risk of unreliability, but the rules allow for upgrades to address unreliability — a crucial exception.
“Because the powertrain was going to be frozen, we made a conscious decision to push the performance envelope and fix reliability issues as we got to them,” Alpine team boss Otmar Szafnauer said, per Autosport. “The FIA allows that, so that was a conscious and strategic decision.
“We didn’t do it on purpose to not be reliable, but if you have to err on that side, you push the performance boundary, because you can’t add performance now until 2026 [but] you can fix reliability issues.
“Strategically I think it was the right thing to do.”
As much as Alpine would’ve liked to have hoped to have joined the frontrunners this year, last year it set itself a plan to start winning races regularly by the end of 2024. Potentially sacrificing this year to unreliability safe in the knowledge that engine problems can be fixed next year is part of that plan.
It’s short-term pain for long-term gain — although Alonso, who will leave the team next year, will see none of the potential profits.
SO WHAT’S MCLAREN GAINING OUT OF THIS?
But the same can’t be said of McLaren. While Ricciardo’s lost points are part of the story, ditching the Aussie won’t be enough to cover up the team’s stagnation this year.
Even if McLaren were to bank the extra 60 points Ricciardo should have scored, the theoretical total of 206 points would still be way less than the 275 points the team scored last season.
Part of the explanation is that the top three teams are hoovering up more points this year, but given both Alpine and McLaren want to join the frontrunning pack, the only way to truly measure progress is to measure how much closer they’re getting to the championship leader year on year.
Points score compared to leader (2021)
Alpine: 25 per cent
McLaren: 45 per cent
Last year McLaren scored almost half as many points as Mercedes, while Alpine scored only around a quarter of the total, but that’s changed markedly this year.
Points score compared to leader (2022)
Alpine: 22 per cent
McLaren: 21 per cent
Both teams have moved backwards relative to new leader Red Bull Racing, but Alpine has slipped only slightly, whereas McLaren is way off its 2021 benchmark.
And now let’s add in the massive number of points both teams have left on the table to estimate each car’s true potential.
Points score compared to leader (lost points included)
Alpine: 33 per cent
McLaren: 31 per cent
If we take out all the unreliability and Ricciardo’s poor form and assume this is a truer reflection of each team’s true performance potential, Alpine has closed the gap to the front while McLaren is still sliding fairly dramatically backwards year on year.
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That’s the real source of the problem. While Ricciardo’s struggles will form a major part of the 2022 post-mortem, they’re not the biggest story at Woking. McLaren’s struggles with the new rules while Alpine’s improvements have continues is at the heart of the battle for fourth.
Alpine will of course still be hoping to claim fourth in the standings — particularly given the needle between the teams — but Enstone will have reason to feel satisfied about the season regardless of the result.
Its car is fundamentally quick. Its engine is more powerful and the gremlins should be fixable in the off-season. Ocon and new teammate Pierre Gasly will form a competitive line-up. It’s still on the path to the front.
McLaren, however, will have some soul-searching to do in pursuit of a much better 2023 before it can claim to be on track to rejoin the winners list.
In that sense whether Ricciardo’s points haul helps or hinders the team to fourth misses the point.