Three years of work. This is the time it took for Ferrari to recover from the sudden loss of performance in 2020 following the secret agreement with the Federation. The suspicion, never proven by the FIA or at least never officially confirmed, is that the previous Ferrari engines bypassed the flowmeter controls, injecting more fuel into the combustion chamber than allowed. However, regardless of the actual trigger, 2020 saw the Ferrari-powered cars suddenly lose competitiveness, plummeting to the bottom of the grid.
Since then, the Prancing Horse engineers have worked with the sole objective of bridging the power gap from Mercedes and Honda. Thus, while the opponents took advantage of the late start to the 2020 Formula 1 championship to update their power units, efforts in Maranello were dedicated to setting up a radically different project. Partly anticipated by the 2021 engine, the new concept was only fully implemented with the 2022 challenger, the F1-75.
However, although Ferrari demonstrated last season that it was able to use power peaks in line with Honda, if not even higher, globally the engine remained slightly inferior to the top competition, especially regarding the compromise between performance and reliability.
Former Scuderia Ferrari team principal Mattia Binotto confirmed that in 2022 the Prancing Horse was aware that it had recovered most of the power gap from its rivals, but precarious reliability still put the engine one step behind its direct rivals: “Regarding the power unit, even in that area we decided to be courageous: we pushed the performance limits beyond what would have been a normal reliability plan. This is because we knew it would be important to catch up with the competition before the four-season power unit development freeze, knowing that reliability issues can always be resolved at a later stage. The power gap that we had, on the other hand, needed to be recovered immediately”. – the Italian manager explained last year.
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“During the tests and in the first races there were no problems”, continued Mattia Binotto – “Then unfortunately the reliability limits emerged and we had to implement a power unit management plan which forced us to change them more often than our rivals, paying the consequences in terms of grid positions” – he admitted.
According to recent statements by new Team Principal Frederic Vasseur, with the 2023 power unit, reliability should finally be under control. If the dyno results were confirmed on the track, Ferrari would therefore complete a three-year recovery journey and would be able to use a power unit that can match its rivals Mercedes and Honda from this point of view.
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