The imperturbability of Mattia Binotto is admirable. Scuderia Ferrari’s Team Principal must be recognized for his enormous ability to deal with negative things exactly as if they were positive. He always manages to convey a dose of optimism, an attitude that is in stark contrast to those who preceded him at the helm of the Maranello team.
Ferrari has hidden itself in the first testing season, this is clear. We will see the true value of the SF1000 only next week, when the SF1000, after having carried out all the aerodynamic and set-up tests, will devote itself to finding time with an empty tank and soft tires.
The judgment on Ferrari’s car is therefore postponed, because it is not fair to let oneself go to considerations on a single-seater that has never been brought to the limit, given that the three days of testing were used to check different behaviors of the SF1000 at varying fuel load and the different suspension and aerodynamic adjustments.
If the alarm bell didn’t ring due to lack of performance, it went off for reliability. Sebastian Vettel had an engine issue on Friday morning after 40 laps. The German suffered a drop in power and stopped the car at turn 12 at the indication of the team: Sebastian immediately stopped the car on the track so as to minimize the consequences of the breakdown and allow a detailed study of the problem.
He cautiously got out of the cockpit, foreshadowing a hybrid trouble, but then he crouched down to look at the rear, before returning to the pits with a service car. The Cavallino technicians sent the power unit immediately to Maranello to find out what caused the issue, but the indications that emerged from the telemetry indicated that it was nothing of the hybrid part of the power unit, but rather a thermal problem.
Considering that the season must be completed with three units, it is clear that this problem should concern us. Because it arrived after just 1,368 km of life when an engine should last almost 5 thousand km (7 GP).
Yet in the paddock there were not too frowned faces: there seems to have been a problem in the lubrication system and an oil leak that was identified in time to avoid the major damage of the 6 cylinder. A simple clamp may have broken and if so it would be nothing serious. Moreover, Haas and Alfa Romeo have not accused problems of power units on cars that are less extreme than the Red one.
The positive result of the day is that the SF1000 has climbed to the top of the top speed classification: in fact, Sebastian Vettel reached the 329 km / h at the speed trap, becoming the fastest of the three days as soon as the car was a little aerodynamically discharged.
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