Ferrari's Senior Performance Engineer and Driver Coach, Jock Clear, is feeling confident that the team can perform at a high level in 2022. With new regulations being introduced next year, there is some uncertainty about who might be at the top. Whilst Clear feels that it is impossible to make predictions, he believes that all of the signs are positive for Ferrari's continued progression. "If you ask me where's my confidence level, I'd say relatively high," Clear told the Beyond The Grid podcast. "Because I see good things going on. "I see a lot of development in the right areas. I see a lot of honesty and objective view of where we are and where we've gone wrong. We're sort of ticking all the boxes that you say, 'This is how you should deal with the issues we've had, and this is the way you should develop.' "Where that puts us in the pecking order really depends technically on what other people come up with and what we come up with, and I have no idea what other people are going to come up with. It really is impossible to say." Clear believes that the gaps between teams will be very narrow in 2022, meaning that Ferrari cannot rest on their laurels. "You might say, 'At the end of the day, we're Ferrari, for god's sake, surely you should be at the front,'" Clear explained. "[But] I think we're all learning now, with the way the sport is and the level that all the teams are at, these teams are separated by a tenth. "Teams are not separated by seconds anymore. It's not like the guys back in P20 are five seconds off the pace. The people in P20 are 1.4 seconds off the pace, and everybody's in-between. And that means for the want of a tenth, you can be P5 or P10. "So for the want of a tenth next year, I think you could be seeing the difference between P1 and P5, because I think the two front runners will have been caught up and will be in that mix for sure. "But it's going to be desperately close, unless we see something technologically that somebody is like, 'Oh yeah, I never thought of that. Maybe we should have done that.' "Who knows? But you can't know whether that's going to happen." As for this year, Ferrari have made progress following a difficult 2020 season and continue to battle with McLaren for P3 in the Constructors' Championship.
Most read
