Scuderia Ferrari’s F1-75 car seemed very fast from the first time it hit the track at the Circuit de Catalunya in the first pre-season testing session back in in February, and despite different track characteristics and weather conditions, the pace has remained strong in all three rounds of the 2022 Formula 1 season, ahead of the Emilia Romagna GP next weekend.
Whule in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia Ferrari and Red Bull seemed evenly matched, with just a few tenths making the different in the end, the Maranello team then dominated in Australia, finishing more than 20 seconds ahead of its rival. One of the more interesting aspects of the Italian side’s current F1 campaign, is that, as opposed to Red Bull, Ferrari has not introduced major updates or changes to its challenger, preferring instead to focus on extracting as much performance as possible from the initial configuration.
Ferrari’s strategy is based on some key factors. To begin with, the F1-75 single-seater was super fast from the start and showed no signs of obvious issues. Just like its opponents, it suffers from bouncing due to porpoising, but the unlike Mercedes, the Maranello team does not seem to lose so much lap time. Red Bull also seems to compromise performance more to deal with porpoising, yet not as much as Mercedes.
Most importantly, by not bringing changes to the package for each race, Scuderia Ferrari has managed to get a better understanding of its new car and this gave the Maranello engineers the possibility to approach each race weekend with an ideal base set-up and configuration. That in turn has the added bonus of allowing the drivers to fully come to terms with the car and know what they need to adapt in order to fully capitalize on its potential, despite the fact that for Carlos Sainz things have been a little more difficult and it has taken him longer to adapt as compared to his Ferrari teammate Charles Leclerc.
With this in mind, by not having to bring new components with tight deadlines in order to find more performance as soon as possible, the Italian side has been able to pace itself in terms of R&D. The team can focus on honing new items that it knows will work when they come to the track, rather than fast-track through stuff that hasn’t been fully proven as a fire-fighting exercise. And taking into consideration the limitations imposed by the budget cap, without the possibility of spending unlimited resources into how much you can do over the course of a full championship, this can become a very important advantage.
“Luckily the car is good since the beginning,” explains chassis operations manager Claudio Albertini. “So it’s something that is good news for us, because then we can focus on good development. With these new regulations it’s a different approach compared to the past, because with the budget cap, actually we have to be very careful, because every development that is not working, is also a waste of money, in addition to not giving performance to the car. The conditions are different from the past. We have to work in a different way. But for sure in our line there are future developments. Also, because this philosophy of car is very new there are many things that we are still investigating, and want to prove.” – he said, as reported by Motorsport.
In short, Scuderia Ferrari has been able to hold back on new parts because the car was good from the off, with sufficient pace to fight for poles and race wins:
“Luckily we met the expectations,” says Albertini. “So in a way you see that the car has a potential. And so as I said, we could spot since the beginning of the project the parts of the car that were more performing, and focus on them. We now understand that our first idea was good, because the important parts are in good shape, and we are going in that direction. So we are still following the base plan that we had since last year.” – he continued.
Scuderia Ferrari did test a new floor specification at the Albert Park circuit in Melbourne, but as was planned it was run by Charles Leclerc during the first free practice session, before he reverted to the normal spec for the rest of the Australian weekend. It was purely a data gathering exercise that will feed into more permanent changes later in the season, and was a good example of the team making efficient use of a Friday practice session.
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“We had a packer in the diffuser,” says Albertini. “Actually, it’s a part that changed the shape of the floor. It was a test item. We knew since the beginning that it would not be in the car for the qualifying and race. And it’s normal nowadays, with less real testing of the car, that you use Friday for this development. It was something related, obviously, to the aerodynamics of the car. And we aim to understand better the airflow, especially on the floor, and the bottom part of the car.
“These special components have the aim of gathering information. So actually, we run that component, we have sensors in the car, we do all the measurements, then we bring all the information at home. And then they can correlate with our calculations, with wind tunnel data. It’s a way we can match the real car and the calculated car, and we have a better picture. For the later development in season of the car, this is the first step. It was not something that was supposed to be better or worse. It was something useful for us to have a different amount of data to consider at home. The floor is obviously the most important part of the car. And this philosophy of car is very new. So we are still understanding new things. Time is going, and so we are focusing on different parts of the floor, trying to improve it overall.” – Claudio Albertini concluded.
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