Being repeatedly upset and disappointed by Ferrari has unfortunately almost become a national sport, which is why for a matter of resilience or immune memory we cannot fall back into the same mistake. After all, on the new single-seater, which will be presented on 17 February 2022 in spite of any superstition (and that’s okay), there are a lot of unknowns and therefore we should not make predictions of any kind.
However, it would not be right to totally ignore the news, or more exactly the signals that come from Maranello, small indiscretions but which seem to point in the same (hoped) right direction.
By crossing the sources and reading between the lines of the words of those few who really have information from inside, the new car seems to be promising. There is a cautious optimism in Maranello, the feeling that a stable, tested and above all efficient group has been working (for some time) on this new car.
Nobody can know, predict, quantify, the gaps or the values on the field, nobody really knows where the other teams are nor if this regulation change will be enough to close an important gap with the fastest teams, yet Ferrari seems to have put all the pieces together. In the right place.
Mattia Binotto explained that the new power engine is innovative, redesigned from zero, more powerful, and will have a hybrid component that already at the end of 2021 (the one used by Charles Leclerc in Russia and Carlos Sainz in Turkey) showed excellent results. In short, from the point of view of the power unit, Ferrari is confident, there is no doubt on this.
The rumors coming from the headquarters of the Maranello team also speak of good results from the point of view of the chassis and suspension. It also remains to be seen how high the aerodynamic efficiency will be, a crucial factor for the new ground-effect single-seaters, conceptually different from previous cars; aerodynamics has often been a weak point in recent years.
And it is here that the Red team hopes to have been “innovative”, even aggressive, and to have interpreted the new regulation better than others. Historically, Ferrari failed the regulatory changes of 2009 and 2014, but it performed well in 2017 (when the cars and the same tires were enlarged). In addition, in 2021 Ferrari did not suffer from the regulation change with the reduction of the floor in the rear area, being able to generate a good load at the rear and significantly improving the overall efficiency of the car compared to 2020 (beyond the improved engine), unlike teams like Mercedes and Aston Martin who suffered from the 2021 regulation. This is at least a good precedent, it means that the aerodynamics department has worked well.
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In recent years, Scuderia Ferrari has given the sensation of being in a perennial phase of transition, a long lethargy, useful for recharging the batteries and rearranging the team in view of a regulatory change that would act as a shock to overturn the values on the field. The rest must be put in by the men of Maranello, who have “trained” on the one hand, recovering confidence and brilliance between 2020 and 2021, but always remaining focused on the new generation single-seater, the project on which all the efforts have been devoted.
It is not the first winter in which, having reached this dead end, before everything is reshuffled, more or less positive indiscretions emerge about the new project of the Maranello years. Compared to other years, however, all sources converge on the strength of the project and this is a fact.
And then there are precise clues, supported by the words of the team principal himself, of a job that has been done in a certain way, to finally have an engine on par with the competitors and an innovative car from an aerodynamic point of view. There is the awareness of a largely stable and now functional team, also at the infrastructure level, free from data correlation problems between computer and track or from obsolete tools. In short, there is the fumus of something positive and sparkling on the horizon, almost an enthusiasm that can reject the too many disappointments of recent years.
We’ll see if all this will be enough, the track will once again be the decisive measure, while remembering that this management has staked everything, including its credibility, on 2022. The year of recovery, circled in red for two years. Hoping that it is above all a red year.
