Ferrari increased power to gain performance, but is paying price through reliability issues. Ferrari increased power to gain performance.

Scuderia Ferrari team principal Mattia Binotto admitted that his F1 team does not have any answers for the reliability issues which affected Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz at the Baku City Circuit in the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.

Charles Leclerc was P1 midway through the race when he had to retire due to a power unit problem, just a few weeks after a similar disappointing outcome at the Circuit de Catalunya in Barcelona, while Carlos Sainz’s race also ended after only nine laps due to a brake-by-wire failure which forced him to go down an escape road, as the Maranello team later explained it was a hydraulic issue.

Haas driver Kevin Magnussen also retired in Baku because of a power unit problem in what was the latest of several issues that have affected Ferrari’s customer teams, as Alfa Romeo’s Zhou Guanyu also retired.

In an interview for Sky after the 2022 Azerbaijan GP, Mattia Binotto admitted that for now it is not possible to know what component failed or if the retirements were related to earlier issues.

“We still need to analyse and understand,” – the Ferrari boss said when asked to explain the problems. “I think you can at the two cars, they had different problems. With Carlos now we’ll look at the hydraulic system, and hopefully we’ll identify it. On Charles a different one, certainly engine related, I think it’s quite obvious by the smoke. Is that something we had in the past? I don’t think so, but maybe yes, and we do look as well at what happened to our customer teams. But I don’t think only with the telemetry data we can have a clear answer to the problem. The components will be shipped back to Maranello and as usual, disassemble and try to understand and to fix them as soon as possible. Is it something which is down to quality, reliability, whatever else, usage? I don’t know yet. But I think it’s no doubt that when you’ve got so many reliability problems, there is a concern.” – Mattia Binotto explained.

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“The increase in performance was important and we are paying for it in terms of reliability. It was a concern when we didn’t get excited at the beginning of the year” – the Ferrari boss concluded.