The start of the 2022 Formula 1 season has fallen well short of Sebastian Vettel’s expectations for Aston Martin.
Vettel is out of contract at the end of the year and even before the 2022 cars had hit the track in pre-season testing it was clear that his future would be a big talking point.
The four-time F1 world champion was betting on the immense potential of the Aston Martin project to extend and revitalise his career after being shuffled out at Ferrari.
Instead, Aston Martin’s dreadful form at the start of 2022 only intensifies the scrutiny of whether Vettel will call it quits sooner rather than later.
Vettel missed the first two rounds of 2022 because he had COVID-19 and watching those races from his sofa would have been a painful experience given how badly Aston Martin’s year began.
Things did not get any better when he got behind the wheel himself in Australia.
Vettel said before the start of the season that he had no predetermined conditions for the team to meet for him to sign a new contract but he talked about two factors that would be important in determining whether he does.
One is what he’d see from F1 itself with its sweeping rules changes, the other is how Aston Martin would perform on track and off it.
It’s still early days but F1’s rule changes in the pursuit of closer, better racing seem to have worked about as well as could be expected.
Unfortunately, because Vettel has an even less competitive car than last year, he isn’t in a position to benefit from how much the new rules have improved racing either.
And this gets to the heart of Vettel’s decision-making process. The impact the new rules had on the pecking order and specifically Aston Martin’s place in it was always his primary interest.
How that has played out so far has been an unwelcome surprise.
Vettel and Aston Martin did not have the first season together that they hoped for or expected in 2021 as it was hurt by the floor rule changes and did not develop its way out of that trouble because it was one of the first teams to switch its full focus to 2022 and the new technical regulations.
The short-term pain suffered last year was therefore meant to pay the team and its star driver back this season.
But that’s not happening just yet. And that’s bad news for the team’s chances of keeping Vettel, who has made it clear he is most interested in winning and that will determine what the future brings.
Vettel has always retained faith in the potential of the Aston Martin project but this was meant to be the start of that potential being realised.
So far that hasn’t happened, and Aston Martin looks a long way from giving Vettel what he wants in terms of results. He said that this would be the year Aston Martin needed to show how good it is and described it as a “true test”.
The result, so far, will be extremely disappointing for him.
The porpoising problem Aston Martin’s car is suffering so badly from means the AMR22 has to be run at a higher ride height, which is severely hurting its performance.
In the meantime, any upgrades or set-up improvements that should make the car better actually make no real difference because the car doesn’t work in reality the way it does in the windtunnel or on the simulator.
Aston Martin is adamant there is up to a 0.75-second gain if it can run the car as it has been designed to run. But that performance remains entirely theoretical for now.
In blunt terms, Aston Martin’s miserable form is unlikely to improve unless the team can get on top of its key car constraint.
And with no short-term improvement in sight, there will be plenty of people wondering if this means the writing is already on the wall for Vettel – who turns 35 in July – and Aston Martin.
Assuming that keeping Vettel remains a priority for Aston Martin, a silver lining for the team will be that while Vettel had high hopes for 2022 he also said one of the key objectives was the team proving it had a competent structure.
That meant either building a very good car from the start or improving a troubled one through the year.
Clearly, Aston Martin is faced with the second scenario. And Vettel will be disappointed to have discovered that. But it’s too soon to write the year off because if the team comes up with a solution, or introduces a major concept change, that transforms its fortunes then Vettel’s outlook will transform with it.
With so much at stake for team and driver, their first grand prix together in 2022 couldn’t have started more problematically.
Vettel joked in Australia things couldn’t get worse but the short-term prognosis isn’t a great deal better.
That will need to change if we’re to realistically expect Vettel to still be at Aston Martin next season – or even in F1 at all.
