Ferrari face dilemma with 2022 ‘special focus’

Scuderia Ferrari team principal Mattia Binotto admitted that any upgrades the Italian side introduces next season must “work immediately” due to the “special focus” on 2022.

With the budget cap now coming into play for 2021, one year before the new regulations, teams face a dilemma over how they split their resources between next season and 2022 when the new sporting and technical rules will be introduced. For Ferrari, it is even more difficult to allocate their resources proportionately because of their underwhelming 2020 – the Scuderia cannot afford to finish as low as P6 in the Constructors’ Championship again.

But by Mattia Binotto’s own admission, 2022 is their opportunity to take a shot at returning to the pinnacle of Formula 1, rather than next season.

So once the FIA ban on 2022 development is lifted in the new year, Binotto says Ferrari must decide “immediately” how they will allocate their resources between both seasons: “The SF1000 cannot be thrown away,” he told reporters, including Motorsport.com – “We tested new diffusers that helped us to solve the correlation problems between the simulator and the track, and will be very useful in 2021. We can aim to finish at least in third place, although we have to be realistic – the gap to first place is too big and the time to reduce it too small. We will have a new power unit, but the chassis will freeze and time spent in the wind tunnel will be reduced by 60%. 2021 will be a particular year in which we will also have to set priorities between the goals of the season and those of 2022. From January, we will be able to start working on the 2022 project, which for us represents an important opportunity thanks to the change in technical regulations. We will have to allocate a lot of resources to this project in a context where there will already be a budget cap that will limit the resources of all the teams, and therefore it will be important to take a decision immediately, in January, to decide how and where to allocate our resources.” – he explained.

“This is why it will not be a year in which we will have evolutions at each race. I believe it would be totally wrong precisely because there is 2022 to prepare for, and this will be one of the biggest difficulties we will have to face next season. Faced with this situation, no mistakes can be made in the update packages because everything that is taken to the track should work almost immediately since the resources will be divided into two projects, with special focus on 2022.” – Scuderia Ferrari team principal Mattia Binotto concluded.