F1 news LIVE: Latest updates as AlphaTauri launch 2022 car

Daniel Ricciardo has confirmed that an option exists in his McLaren contract to extend his stay into 2023.

Team-mate Lando Norris signed a new deal until the end of 2025 with the Woking-based squad earlier this month, as the team sought to tie down the highly-rated 22-year-old after a very impressive 2021 campaign. Ricciardo, on the other hand, struggled for the most of the season, despite taking victory at Monza.

“Time is not really an issue,” Ricciardo told Sky Sports F1 when asked about the terms of his deal. “We have time. Not that we want it to take five years, but it’s there if we need it. I know Lando did the extension, but I do have an option there and I do feel quite strongly that we’re in this together.

“Of course on-track it is frustrating, but I was still really enjoying this McLaren environment and the team, so it’s an environment I want to have success in and thrive in. Obviously we got a taste of that in Monza, so it’s fair to say that both of us have the objective of being World Champion.”

McLaren team principal Andreas Seidl says that the FIA must admit that mistakes were made in the running of the controversial Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, as the governing body gets ready to announce the conclusion of its investigation in Michael Masi’s unprecedented interpretation of the safety car rules.

“It is clear that what happened in Abu Dhabi was very controversial and not good for the sport,” said Seidl. “If you look at the entire season, a lot of controversial things happened that were overall not good for the sport. We need to invest time and energy to understand what happened in the season and see how we can help by making the regulations less complex [and] by giving more support to the race director and to the stewards to avoid the mistakes happening.

“It is still a human sport and that we shouldn’t forget. And we need to accept mistakes can happen on the team side and on the FIA side. And it’s important we create an environment where if mistakes happen, you raise your hand and admit them. That is as important as trying to avoid similar controversies in the first place.”

Gasly was also asked about his team-mate Yuki Tsunoda in the same Q&A session, after the Japanese driver finished fourteenth in the standings in his rookie season, and the Frenchman was full of praise for his eccentric personality.

“I would say the positive first one is he’s just a one-man show,” Gasly explained. “The guy literally the entire day is just doing the weirdest things you could imagine. I don’t know, it’s just the way he is, he’s just a funny character. No filter, which can be quite embarrassing in some interviews sometimes, but that’s why we love him.”

Pierre Gasly enjoyed another stellar season in in 2021, regularly outperforming rivals in faster machinery and challenging towards the top end of the grid order.

The Frenchman believes that Alpha Tauri under delivered in the final standings, though, and should have finished fifth ahead of Alpine. The Alpine car’s pace was inconsistent throughout the course of the season, but they reeled in their Italian rivals in the latter stages of the campaign.

“I must say, as much as I was looking forward to [2021] and our expectations were also quite high at the start of the year, we still overperformed to what we expected,” he said in an Alpha Tauri Q&A after the season finale at Abu Dhabi. “Especially in qualifying. It was really good on Saturdays, Sundays as well. I mean, 100 points [plus] was better than we could have imagined. On the bad side, let’s say, of it, even though we did an amazing season we still finished P6, and I do feel like we could have got Alpine.”

The Alpha Tauri team will launch their 2022 car, the AT03, at 11am UK time this morning.

The Red Bull sister squad have retained the services of lead driver Pierre Gasly and team-mate Yuki Tsunoda, and have teased images on their social media channels suggesting that they ill incorporate the colours of the Italian flag into their livery design for the new campaign.

With 2022 seeing a raft of regulation changes brought into F1 in an effort to allow for closer wheel-to-wheel racing, the Faenza-based squad will be hoping to jump up the grid order after finishing sixth last time out.

Follow all the latest Formula One news and updates on a potentially significant day, as the F1 Commission meets in London to discuss the controversial end to last season’s title race between Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. Hamilton is awaiting the results on an inquiry into how the closing stages of the race were allowed to unfold, after race director Michael Masi decided to permit some but not all cars to pass the safety car, setting up a final-lap shootout as Max Verstappen overtook him on fresh tyres to win the title.

Today is the day where the findings of Formula One’s investigation into Abu Dhabi Grand Prix are set to be presented, but the results may not be published until the eve of the 2022 season in Bahrain in March. It has been reported that Hamilton’s future in the sport hinges of the outcome of the F1 Commission’s inquiry into the controversy, although the 37-year-old has returned to Mercedes ahead of the team’s car launch later this week. AlphaTauri will become the latest team to unveil their 2022 car today, as Pierre Gasly and Yuki Tsunoda reveal their new car, with Williams, Ferrari and Mercedes all set for their car launches later this week.