The Baku Grand Prix ended in the worst way possible for Ferrari, with two retirements and a Power Unit which went up in smoke. On Saturday, the results in the Qualifying session confirmed the progress of F1-75 after the upgrades in Spain, which also worked at their best here and which provided further positive responses to the technical team from Maranello. The rear wing made its debut in a brilliant way, giving the Ferrari a speed of around 7km / h above the specification used in Jeddah and Miami – as analyzed after Qualifying.
Unfortunately, all the positive conditions literally went up in smoke with the withdrawal of the two Ferrari cars. An alarm bell had already gone off when Carlos Sainz was forced to park his F1-75 in turn 4, but everything fell apart when Charles Leclerc also had to retire while leading the race, with an engine in smoke. Two very different technical problems, that do not reassure Maranello, which however are not a total surprise for those who have studied, elaborated and developed this project.
Already during the winter a lot has been said about how the focus of Maranello was all about improving the internal combustion engine to reduce the gap from the top teams – Red Bull and Mercedes in 2021 – if not even create an advantage for the 2022 season. Last year the gap was around 15-20hp during the season – between the debut of the PU and the next hybrid update. The goal was fully successful because today, with the power units frozen in the thermal part, Ferrari enjoys an advantage of about 5 / 10Cv over the closest competition, namely Honda.
Power Unit 2 is not meeting expectations regarding reliability
Ferrari’s start of the season was very promising, but in Maranello they never deceived themselves or relaxed after the good results from the first races and they continued to work tirelessly. The results have been seen with the aerodynamic updates in Barcelona, while the failures have caused the F1-75 cars to lose a lot of points in these last few races. In fact, Charles Leclerc lost 50 points between Spain and Baku. In this case, Carlos Sainz also paid the price in a weekend that was finally seeing him gain more confidence with the car which instead betrayed him after a few laps, while the Spanish driver was limiting himself to tire management and was ready to push. Certainly not a lucky moment for him, but that goes for both Ferrari drivers.
The dilemma that exists in Maranello now, however, concerns the Power Unit 2 which was introduced in Imola on Carlos Sainz’s F1-75 and in Miami on the car of Charles Leclerc. Ferrari, with the approval of the FIA, had intervened on the ICE component to improve reliability, that has always been a major focus of Ferrari, but which has now come out overwhelmingly and is not only damaging the official team, but also the customer teams, who in the last few appointments have not hidden a bit of frustration for this situation. As Mattia Binotto said in the post-race interview, the cases must always be analyzed individually as some of them may not be strictly related to the power unit.
Since this new element was introduced there have been two DNFs – due to overheating in Spain while here we will have to wait for Ferrari to analyze it back in Maranello. According to what has been learned and reported by Giuliano Duchessa & Paolo D’Alessandro for formu1a.uno, Power Unit 2 will no longer be recoverable for Charles Leclerc.
Ferrari will take all the time to proceed with the analyzes after these back to back race weekends; time is short and the cars will be sent directly to Montreal where the engine will obviously be replaced. In Canada, in fact, Ferrari will use the third unit, albeit with a doubt: will it be the specification 1 or the specification with reinforced ICE, which however is not giving the desired results at the moment?
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Charles Leclerc’s problem seems to be linked precisely to the ICE, while as regards the premature retirement of Carlos Sainz, here the attention of the technicians shifts to the brake-by-wire and the hydraulic part of the car that stopped the Spaniard. However, formu1a.uno confirms it also involved the gearbox.
Some technicians fear that the various issue may also be part of a single aspect, namely overheating. In fact, the first power unit, as long as it was used, has never raced in the hot conditions found for example in Miami, Spain or here in Baku. In Bahrain the race schedule helped, as well as in Jeddah. While in Melbourne everything went according to plan, however, the data was insufficient to have a clear answer on the issue.
