After crashing into the barriers on his Monaco Grand Prix debut during a practice session, Lance Stroll tried to explain away the mishap.
“If you don’t touch the wall in Monaco, you’re not on the limit,” said the then-Williams driver, now at Aston Martin.
His mechanics, who then had to work through both day and night to repair his front wing and much of the right-hand side of his car might have begged to differ, but there is an element of truth to his defence.
Monaco tests a driver like no other track, even the most accomplished just a fraction away from a nasty prang at the most unforgiving of circuits. It is the great unknown on the calendar, a facet which has been ramped up in 2022. Teams are still getting to grips with the new regulations — and the cars they have created within those rules — and all arrived in the principality with an air of uncertainty: how best to set up their car; and quite how it will fare on the particular nuances of the tight, twisty street circuit.
The rear-ends of these 2022 cars have a propensity to pop out, not ideal at Monaco. And following complaints about visibility from some in Jeddah from their cockpits regarding the new shape of the cars, that issue could be exacerbated this weekend.
Trying to predict how events might unfold is far from straightforward. Mercedes have been good in the slow-speed corners all season until Barcelona, where their upgrades improved their straight-line speed and pace in the fast corners but to the detriment of the cars’ ability in those slow corners.
So, team principal Toto Wolff said after the Spanish Grand Prix he was most pessimistic about Mercedes’ chances at Monaco above all the other 21 grands prix on the calendar. McLaren, powered by a Mercedes engine, are another who have fared well in the slow corners, but team boss Andreas Seidl was only marginally more positive than Wolff.
“Monaco is such a special track that it’s always difficult to predict how you do there,” he said. “It’s such a specific track that, together with having these completely new cars, it’s probably even more difficult to predict what it’s going to look like. I guess we can go there cautiously optimistic but, at the same time, we all start from zero again on Friday morning and just wait and see how it goes.”
Mercedes and McLaren will likely be a footnote to the race weekend. Instead, it has all the makings of a Charles Leclerc versus Max Verstappen battle yet again.
Red Bull have generally fared well here, winning this race five times, most recently with the Dutchman a year ago.
In contrast, Leclerc has never before finished an F1 race on the streets of Monaco where he was born and brought up and still lives. He suffered brake failure on his debut 2018 and then crashed again the following year while trying to force his way through the field after a dire qualifying session.
His luck seemed to have changed last year when he took pole, only for a late qualifying crash to result in a broken driveshaft hub, which could not be repaired in time for him to make the start. In total, in three attempts, he has completed just 30 F1 race laps in the principality.
Despite that, he is adamant he is not cursed. “I don’t want to believe in that,” he said. “The last few years haven’t been the best, but I don’t believe in bad luck and I’m pretty sure that things will go my way this year.”
The other great unknown this weekend is the very future of the race. Its contract is up for renewal and there are suggestions it could run biennially in the future. That looks unlikely to happen to F1’s jewel in the crown, but there is pressure to improve the facilities, such as the narrow pitlane, to bring things more into the 21st century.
And yet there is a fine balance between modernising and keep the magic of a race which remains a survival of the fittest.
