2022 Formula One Monaco Grand Prix

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Monaco.jpg
As Formula 1 rolls into its most famous race location, there is a new name on top of the driver's standings.

Ferrari and Charles Leclerc will be hoping that there is no such thing as a curse, as the Monegasque needs to regain some momentum in the championship standings on his home turf. His string of unfortunate finishes on home turf is well-known in the Formula 1 space, and includes five consecutive DNF's dating back to his time as a driver in F2.

For the first time following a race this season, Leclerc is not atop the drivers' standings. Max Verstappen of Red Bull complained about his failing DRS system at the Spanish Grand Prix, but still managed to score a strong victory. His teammate, Sergio Perez, was understandably frustrated in being asked to let Verstappen through in Spain. The pair have put their team ahead of Ferrari now by a margin of 26 points.

Mercedes seems to have finally found a competitive pace, with drivers George Russell and Lewis Hamilton both finishing in the top five in Spain, and nearly taking the third and fourth spots before cooling issues forced Hamilton to ease his pace in the final laps.

Lando Norris continues his strong season in the McLaren and finds himself 7th in the standings, while his teammate Daniel Ricciardo continues to struggle and has no scored a point since his home race in Australia.

The new regulations this year gave teams a chance to advance themselves within a field that had become stagnant in recent years, and this has created a fascinating midfield battle. Below the Red Bull, Ferrari and Mercedes cars which occupy the top six driver spots in the standings, five different teams occupy the next five spots. Norris, Valtteri Bottas, Esteban Ocon, Kevin Magnussen and Yuki Tsunoda rank 7th through 11th for McLaren, Alfa Romeo, Alpine, Haas and Alphatauri respectively.

Monaco is F1's most famous race, but not known as a great site for overtaking. The new regulations aren't expected to change that, but the 30-50% chance of rain on race day just might.

Give us your thoughts on this year's Monaco race, or anything else relating to F1 so far this season in the comments below.
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About author
Mike Smith
Mike Smith
I have been obsessed with sim racing and racing games since the 1980's. My first taste of live auto racing was in 1988, and I couldn't get enough ever since. Lead writer for RaceDepartment, and owner of SimRacing604 and its YouTube channel. Favourite sims include Assetto Corsa Competizione, Assetto Corsa, rFactor 2, Automobilista 2, DiRT Rally 2 - On Twitter as @simracing604

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Comments

markg88
Premium
Damage Inc said:
Thing is you HAVE to expect someone like Lewis to get grief, dominant sports people are ALWAYS hated as much as they are loved. It's perfectly normal, Look at Valentino Rossi in MGP....got horrific abuse towards the end of his career as age caught up with him, not "because" he was old, but because he dominated and many regard him as the 2 wheel "goat" (despite Agostini having a better record). Marc Marquez who's the most recent bike GP dominant (and is called the new GOAT by his fans)rider also get's a load of stick online, some people wish him to have a career ending injury for gawds sakes!! Johnny Rea in WSBK get's grief and dominated for 6 years (and is called the GOAT of WSBKs).

What doesn't help Lewis is the extreme end of his fanbase, who are incredibly ignorant of the minutiae of motorsports and seem to think Lewis is a racing god of some sort. Thankfully rare on sites like this where there's more knowledge of motorports.....but they infest facebook etc like a plague of the stupid. (not just Lewis I hasten to add, some new Max fans are becoming just as awful).

But ultimately many people were sick of him winning all the time and are delighted he is struggling now, it's normal. If Lewis wasn't so successfull no-one would give a ****, so see it as a compliment and don't let it get to you. I don't with J.Rea (I'm a huge Kawasaki fan, hence avatar).
Click to expand...
I don't compare car racing with bike racing really. I am a big fan of both and as I ride(not race) and drive (have raced) I am convinced the rider is more a part of success than a F1 driver(particularly) is.
I think we fans would be just as fed up with A.N.Other winning almost every race in 8 seasons as we are with Hamilton. We see it, reasonably I feel, that Hamilton or the fictitious A.N.Other win so much because of too much of an advantage over others. Not a fair fight essentially. I was fed up just as much during the Schumacher and Vettel domination periods. Also though, I do think Hamilton's personality and drama-queen stuff puts people off him, certainly that's how I feel.
 
Celestiale
LeSunTzu said:
Hamilton might be utterly dominating like in 20 or completely nowhere like this year, you guys keep on spitting acid. Thanks to RD, it does not reach the motorsport.com level of toxicity but it still is a pity to see that repetitive Hamilton bashing again and again and again while there's interesting stuff to discuss this season.
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OR maybe it is just some general, neutral observations, that die-hard Hamilton fans see as blasphemy? I have rarely seen "Hamilton bashing" at all in this forum. Or is it "bashing" to say that he is not the best driver of all times / at the moment? Some people get triggered really easy
 
Damage Inc
markg88 said:
I don't compare car racing with bike racing really. I am a big fan of both and as I ride(not race) and drive (have raced) I am convinced the rider is more a part of success than a F1 driver(particularly) is.
I think we fans would be just as fed up with A.N.Other winning almost every race in 8 seasons as we are with Hamilton. We see it, reasonably I feel, that Hamilton or the fictitious A.N.Other win so much because of too much of an advantage over others. Not a fair fight essentially. I was fed up just as much during the Schumacher and Vettel domination periods. Also though, I do think Hamilton's personality and drama-queen stuff puts people off him, certainly that's how I feel.
Click to expand...
Yup, I never like the Schumacher years (as a Williams fan I was still narked about the "Hill Incident"!!) and was disliking the Vettel years as much. I just don't get why people say that everyone should laud Hamilton as the GOAT just because "stats". I know some people said it about Schumacher but it wasn't universal and many would say Senna/Prost (as they do now). I just get the feeling that for some reason people want Hamilton to be treated different.
 
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paracletus
Okkon is doing a lot better than Alonso this year too.

One is considered a mediocre F1 driver, and the other is often mentioned as one of the best of the modern era.

These cars are godawful (apart from Ferrari & Red Bull), and I'm not going to judge how good any so called "GATs" really are based on this nonsense.
 
CMGARAGE
Damage Inc said:
Thing is you HAVE to expect someone like Lewis to get grief, dominant sports people are ALWAYS hated as much as they are loved. It's perfectly normal, Look at Valentino Rossi in MGP....got horrific abuse towards the end of his career as age caught up with him, not "because" he was old, but because he dominated and many regard him as the 2 wheel "goat" (despite Agostini having a better record). Marc Marquez who's the most recent bike GP dominant (and is called the new GOAT by his fans)rider also get's a load of stick online, some people wish him to have a career ending injury for gawds sakes!! Johnny Rea in WSBK get's grief and dominated for 6 years (and is called the GOAT of WSBKs).

What doesn't help Lewis is the extreme end of his fanbase, who are incredibly ignorant of the minutiae of motorsports and seem to think Lewis is a racing god of some sort. Thankfully rare on sites like this where there's more knowledge of motorports.....but they infest facebook etc like a plague of the stupid. (not just Lewis I hasten to add, some new Max fans are becoming just as awful).

But ultimately many people were sick of him winning all the time and are delighted he is struggling now, it's normal. If Lewis wasn't so successfull no-one would give a ****, so see it as a compliment and don't let it get to you. I don't with J.Rea (I'm a huge Kawasaki fan, hence avatar).
Click to expand...

I think we're on the same page but I'm not arguing Lewis is the GOAT so I'm not sure why people keep trying to explain to me why they think he shouldn't be called it. I only go on twitter because it's the only way to get in touch with companies these days and my experience is it's mostly junk filled with Elon Musk and Amber Herd memes. So if you're not finding great discussions there probably give it a miss but I don't see why responding to me here when I'm not actually saying that and can't see others doing the same.

I understand the schadenfreude and see the funny side of Toto launching this seasons car with the line 'we start again from zero' :laugh: (looking back I assume it was meant to be a clever teaser for the 'zero' pod design that at the time was still under wraps but well, didn't age well).

I know the feeling of sitting through one constructor's dominence all to well. RB, Ferrari, Williams etc. so understand the want for change. There's certainly a different tone from 'phew, finally something differnt', though.

I follow the motoGP but alot more casually than F1 since a few years ago (Monday re-runs on free tv). I've seen both riders but neither at their peak. I assume VR has the most titles of the 2 but MM has dominated in style too. Am I right in thinking MM also raced with a style that was adapted by the riders trying to keep up with him? From casual observation Rossi got old and MM hasn't been the same since numerous injuries. I don't know who was the best objectively and if they were the Greatest of all Time. I'll tell you what though, I'm confident both were up there with the best of their generations. For the sake of arguement, let's say Rossi absolutely outstayed his welcome or MM should jack it in now, how does that diminish their past records. I don't care who you prefer, if any, and youre entitled to choose for any reason. I will call you out though if you tried to argue, with sincerity, that Rossi finished his last race in 6th place (for example) therefore he's hardly a champ.

And thats two examples that are 'past' it (hopefully MM still has time left). Everyone's assuming that HAM is done now that he's trailing RUS in this years standings after how many races? It's certainly not a forgone conclusion and, feel free to accuse me of having the blinkers on, I don't see the evidence on track that he's totally spent. Case in point, his decent recovery drive at Spain.

Richard Wilks said:
That is a lot of talk to defend Lewis.

I've noticed this trend lately. Lewis fans either gone totally silent, or their posts get longer and longer with excuses and achievement lists.

Where is zuneguy these days?

Like they say, talk is cheap. Now he has a hungry young driver along side him. He should do as he said and do his talk on the track, or else George will be yet another driver that beat the "goat".

Like Muzikant said, more than anything, most people are happy that the endless mercedes parades are over.

And George should be actually pissed that he was kept in williams so long that his chance at a winning car has passed. Maybe Mclaren should have done the same, and put Lewis in a backmarker team back then, and maybe they would have won the 2007 champ, right?...
Click to expand...

It's telling that all the replies quoting me are focused on the length of my post rather than the content. It's discussion forum which lends itself to longer form discussion and I was quoted by/replied by a few users who I tried to address. If you want shorter form slinging matches perhaps try twitter or a discord channel? Oh wait, that's where all the the '7 tImEs gOaT!!!!!1!!!1' posts are coming from that mean this place must be a safe space to posts 'he's not winning much now the cars not up to scratch'.

Can only speak for myself but, as a Hamilton fan, I haven't gone quiet and have always been capable of painfully long posts (hope you manage this one!). :p I have rarely posted in any of the F1 discussions here. One of the reasons used to be RD went through a phase of chasing clicks by posting spoilers on the front page for all major real life motorsports so I had to duck out to avoid who won that weekend if I didn't see an event. The other, well, is that the actual discussion here isn't that great. Case in point, TRASGU makes a great post in defence of why Monaco belongs on the calender and instead of being a springboard for a great discussion (for or against) it's folowed up immediately by 'it sucks'.

I'll say it again (pretty sure I've mentioned it in the massive wall of text you all keep quoting) I've personally never claimed HAM is the GOAT. The only mention not usually in quotation marks being with the explicit caveat of it being statistically which I think is fair to objectively argue, and wasn't in a race thread but about him recieving a knighthood. Again in that instance I wasn't arguing that HAM is the greatest and deserves the knighthood; it was more aimed at poor arguements of why he didn't 'deserve' it (he wasn't dead yet, Jim Clark didn't get one, he wasn't curing covid etc).

Of course with stats, you can manipulate to give you the result you want and, again as if it needs saying, stats are not the be all and end all.

Thing is you need some metric to measure success. Go through pretty any metric that measures success in the sport and HAM does well. Sure, you can then start cherry picking the ones you don't like but look at it the other way and compare with who are the other contenders with the same caveats and it turns out it isn't easy to find a driver to fulfil that remit.

From what I've seen of the stats the best case, imho, is probably for Fangio all things considered. That was way before my era so I can only go off history books and testimony.

But again, my case was never that HAM is the GOAT, it's that pointing out he was never any good because he's had great cars beneath is silly and counterproductive.

Not sure your last points either. RUS must be frustrated that Merc haven't delivered him a title chasing car but it'd be incredibly naive to write off his career. And as someone who literally argued in the post you quoted; that time with a backmarker isn't the magic bullet the cliche lead you to believe no, HAM didn't need to be in a feeder team. Think he proved himself quite capable compared to his experienced rivals. Danny RIC presumbly summoning all the life skills from his days at HRT for this season. :redface:

Again, really weird yardsticks you keep pulling up when appraising HAM.
 
Damage Inc
CMGARAGE said:
I think we're on the same page but I'm not arguing Lewis is the GOAT so I'm not sure why people keep trying to explain to me why they think he shouldn't be called it. I only go on twitter because it's the only way to get in touch with companies these days and my experience is it's mostly junk filled with Elon Musk and Amber Herd memes. So if you're not finding great discussions there probably give it a miss but I don't see why responding to me here when I'm not actually saying that and can't see others doing the same.

I understand the schadenfreude and see the funny side of Toto launching this seasons car with the line 'we start again from zero' :laugh: (looking back I assume it was meant to be a clever teaser for the 'zero' pod design that at the time was still under wraps but well, didn't age well).

I know the feeling of sitting through one constructor's dominence all to well. RB, Ferrari, Williams etc. so understand the want for change. There's certainly a different tone from 'phew, finally something differnt', though.

I follow the motoGP but alot more casually than F1 since a few years ago (Monday re-runs on free tv). I've seen both riders but neither at their peak. I assume VR has the most titles of the 2 but MM has dominated in style too. Am I right in thinking MM also raced with a style that was adapted by the riders trying to keep up with him? From casual observation Rossi got old and MM hasn't been the same since numerous injuries. I don't know who was the best objectively and if they were the Greatest of all Time. I'll tell you what though, I'm confident both were up there with the best of their generations. For the sake of arguement, let's say Rossi absolutely outstayed his welcome or MM should jack it in now, how does that diminish their past records. I don't care who you prefer, if any, and youre entitled to choose for any reason. I will call you out though if you tried to argue, with sincerity, that Rossi finished his last race in 6th place (for example) therefore he's hardly a champ.

And thats two examples that are 'past' it (hopefully MM still has time left). Everyone's assuming that HAM is done now that he's trailing RUS in this years standings after how many races? It's certainly not a forgone conclusion and, feel free to accuse me of having the blinkers on, I don't see the evidence on track that he's totally spent. Case in point, his decent recovery drive at Spain.



It's telling that all the replies quoting me are focused on the length of my post rather than the content. It's discussion forum which lends itself to longer form discussion and I was quoted by/replied by a few users who I tried to address. If you want shorter form slinging matches perhaps try twitter or a discord channel? Oh wait, that's where all the the '7 tImEs gOaT!!!!!1!!!1' posts are coming from that mean this place must be a safe space to posts 'he's not winning much now the cars not up to scratch'.

Can only speak for myself but, as a Hamilton fan, I haven't gone quiet and have always been capable of painfully long posts (hope you manage this one!). :p I have rarely posted in any of the F1 discussions here. One of the reasons used to be RD went through a phase of chasing clicks by posting spoilers on the front page for all major real life motorsports so I had to duck out to avoid who won that weekend if I didn't see an event. The other, well, is that the actual discussion here isn't that great. Case in point, TRASGU makes a great post in defence of why Monaco belongs on the calender and instead of being a springboard for a great discussion (for or against) it's folowed up immediately by 'it sucks'.

I'll say it again (pretty sure I've mentioned it in the massive wall of text you all keep quoting) I've personally never claimed HAM is the GOAT. The only mention not usually in quotation marks being with the explicit caveat of it being statistically which I think is fair to objectively argue, and wasn't in a race thread but about him recieving a knighthood. Again in that instance I wasn't arguing that HAM is the greatest and deserves the knighthood; it was more aimed at poor arguements of why he didn't 'deserve' it (he wasn't dead yet, Jim Clark didn't get one, he wasn't curing covid etc).

Of course with stats, you can manipulate to give you the result you want and, again as if it needs saying, stats are not the be all and end all.

Thing is you need some metric to measure success. Go through pretty any metric that measures success in the sport and HAM does well. Sure, you can then start cherry picking the ones you don't like but look at it the other way and compare with who are the other contenders with the same caveats and it turns out it isn't easy to find a driver to fulfil that remit.

From what I've seen of the stats the best case, imho, is probably for Fangio all things considered. That was way before my era so I can only go off history books and testimony.

But again, my case was never that HAM is the GOAT, it's that pointing out he was never any good because he's had great cars beneath is silly and counterproductive.

Not sure your last points either. RUS must be frustrated that Merc haven't delivered him a title chasing car but it'd be incredibly naive to write off his career. And as someone who literally argued in the post you quoted; that time with a backmarker isn't the magic bullet the cliche lead you to believe no, HAM didn't need to be in a feeder team. Think he proved himself quite capable compared to his experienced rivals. Danny RIC presumbly summoning all the life skills from his days at HRT for this season. :redface:

Again, really weird yardsticks you keep pulling up when appraising HAM.
Click to expand...
yup reasonable assessements. I do feel sorry for the majority of Lewis fans as they get caught up in all the nonsense of "best ever" + "GOAT". As per usual with humanity the stupid are the most vocal. I peruse Farcebook on a regular basis (for some bizarre reason I cannot fathom) and sometimes my reactions to what is said there spill out onto here. Although to be fair when you do find that golden nugget of someone with a brain on facebook .....it's nice to have a good chat with them!
 
G
davehenrie said:
I may be mis-understanding your post, but this year's troubles for Hamilton kinda PROVES he had the fastest, best car/engine package for almost his entire Mercedes & part of his Mclaren career.
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That's what I meant, I just said that he can still improve, Mercedes can improve this year, but it shows that all these broken records and number of titles was due to the fact that he raced alone for 7 years and still lost a title to weak Rosberg and almost lost one to weak Felipe Massa.

I think he is an excellent pilot but far from being a GOAT as they say
 

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