A reshuffle as they say in politics. For now nothing more. The reorganization of the Scuderia Ferrari is made up of the usual faces but with different roles. Mattia Binotto has entrusted the technical responsibility to Enrico Cardile, head of a new area called Performance Department in which “… he will count on the experience of Rory Byrne and established engineers such as David Sanchez” specified the team principal.
The new performance department will be the centre of development in search of the missing performance of the SF1000. The managers of the individual technical areas will operate around: Enrico Gualtieri remains in charge of the Power Unit, Laurent Mekies, sporting director and responsible for the track activities, and Simone Resta, head of the Chassis Engineering department.
The structure, therefore, loses its horizontal organization (in which it was easier to divide responsibilities, according to an ancient habit rooted in Maranello over the decades) and a summit is created from which choices will have to start to be made in order to recover the much lost ground from Mercedes.
Mattia Binotto understood from his own experience that the matrix system does not work but a greater sharing of the car’s data is needed, although there has been the fear of avoiding the circulation of information so as not to fuel the leak of very confidential information that last year had brought Red Bull to have a very detailed list of the systems used in Maranello to block the operation of the flow meter.
In Maranello, therefore, they focused on stability, giving confidence to Mattia Binotto who, among other things, must complete the signing of the new Concorde Agreement with Louis Camilleri, the document that commits the Scuderia to race in F1 in the next five years .
Last year, the managers managed to snatch from Libert Media 38% of the fixed prizes, a truly exorbitant percentage of earnings that had sparked everyone else’s protests.
Ferrari managed to monetize what is its historical value in the Circus, taking a very important victory, before inserting a series of painful defeats such as the reduction of the budget cap, the freezing of the 2020 single-seaters and the shifting of the new rules to 2022 .
The Scuderia, therefore, does not intend to hunt leading technicians on the market: it is up to Cardile to restore order in the departments and reinforce the weak areas with insertions from the outside in the second lines, but in this moment of crisis there is an aspect that must not be overlooked at all: the re-evaluation of Rory Byrne.
The 76-year-old South African engineer is a luxury consultant for the Maranello team who has collaborated with Ferrari since 1997: he designed the winning cars of the Michael Schumacher era after winning two world championships with Benetton. A very creative engineer, he has gained a wealth of enormous experience from which, perhaps, the new generations of technicians have not learned as much as they could.
In reality, Rory, especially in this terrible phase, can be a precious additional resource, capable of avoiding those mistakes that the man of experience would never make. If Cardile does not consider him an “old trombone” that has run its course, a precious shoulder could be found on a path that will be fraught with difficulties.
Since it is true that the 2020 single-seaters are frozen, Rory Byrne can be precious in finding the loopholes in which to develop the SF1000 in view of next season, while in the Racing Department they will begin to define the 2022 single-seater, that of the great change of Formula 1.
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