After several years in the wilderness, McLaren are returning to the kind of form that becomes the great team and 2022 is the year when they expect to be making a mark in Formula 1 once again.
The great Woking outfit has not won a Grand Prix since Jenson Button triumphed in Brazil back in 2012. Zak Brown and the team he built have yet to taste victory from the fruits of their good work, but he expects that all to change in the near future.
F1 has been lopsided since the advent of the new Hybrid Turbo rules almost a decade ago. Only three teams were capable of Grand Prix victories during this period, and right now only one team is doing the winning in this era of Mercedes dominance.
Despite his team pushing for podiums on a regular basis these days, Brown believes the real opportunities to win again will come about in 2022 when the F1 budget cap becomes part of the rules, “Ultimately, our goal is to catch whoever is in first place and that’s been Mercedes for quite some time.
“We’re certainly encouraged that we are now racing Ferrari because we weren’t last year and haven’t been for quite some time.
“While we want to catch the three teams that are in front of us now, or in this instance, currently two teams, I think we need to pay a lot of attention and recognise that teams four, five, six and even seven right now, are all going to be serious contenders when the budget cap comes in.
“Everyone’s starting on a clean sheet of paper, which I think that then means we’re going to have an awesome era of Formula 1,” predicted Brown.
F1 new rules package was set to be introduced in 2021, but the COVID-19 pandemic has forced the sport to postpone the big changes for 2022, which means fans and teams – bar Mercedes – will be treading water until then.