F1, Ferrari Power Unit: most powerful of all but not yet completely reliable

“The Ferrari Power Unit will be a bomb”. These were the words of Gunther Steiner, at the beginning of December, on the occasion of the Bandini Trophy award ceremony.

The Haas Team Principal had been tipped off by Mattia Binotto who would soon leave Scuderia Ferrari. A little over a month after those statements were made, the circusf1 Italian website managed to gather various other information based on which they are able to confirmed that the Power Unit built in Maranello for the 2023 Formula One season will be the most powerful on the gird.

The new power unit will be an evolution of the one used last year: it will be mounted on the new Ferrari but also on the new single-seaters of the Alfa Romeo and Haas F1 teams. In Maranello they worked on reliability, the real main weaknesses of 2022, and they did it both during the last season and during the winter.

The work to improve this aspect has allowed the Maranello engineers to be able to push the power of the Power Unit as well and therefore being able to use the horsepower that had been sacrificed in 2022 so as not to compromise the result on the track even further due to technical failures.

However, from what has been learned by circusf1, the first version of the 2023 Power Unit approved for the start of the new season would not yet have given the guarantee of being able to cover the amount of kilometers sufficient to allow Ferrari technicians to plan a season with only three internal combustion engines and the minimum quantities of the other components, as imposed by the regulation.

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We recall that last year, both Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz had to use even twice as many components of the Power Unit, compared to the three indicated by the regulation.

At the time of writing, the 2023 plan provides for at least four Power Units and related components planned to be able to complete the 2023 Formula 1 season with a certain degree of safety. Over the next few months, however, Ferrari could still play the “reliability” card, in order to be able to work again on some details of its power unit and further improve the already excellent work that the Maranello engineering team has done so far.

Both Haas and Alfa Romeo are already aware of this fact, so that they too can better plan the use of all the components of the Power Unit, during the span of the 2023 Formula One season which, according to the calendar, includes 23 scheduled races.