“That’s in the past; I prefer not to talk about it any more. However, what we were doing at the time was pushing somehow the line of interpretations. As a matter of fact, it wasn’t illegal, or we would have been disqualified.” – in this way Scuderia Ferrari team principal Mattia Binotto – interviewed by the BBC – looked back at the agreement between the Maranello team and the Federation announced at the end of the winter tests of 2020 in Barcelona, a statement in which the FIA and Ferrari had also stressed that they are ready to collaborate on the biofuel research which debuted this season in Formula 1.
The official note of the agreement between Ferrari and FIA was the conclusion of investigations begun in the final part of the 2019 championship against the power unit built in Maranello. The analyzes conducted by the Federation led to technical directives that made Ferrari – but not only – lose a lot of power in 2020.
That way of exploiting the engine was powerful enough for us to have a significant disadvantage the following year that we were not expecting to have. In that year, Ferrari was not the only one losing power on the grid. Most of the manufacturers lost power at that time. But we were the ones losing power the most and that put us from being at an advantage to a clear disadvantage. On top of that, we designed the 2020 car knowing we had a power unit advantage, so we designed it towards a lot of downforce, accepting a lot of drag. We had no opportunity to improve the car during the season itself,” Binotto says. “It was a difficult moment, because I don’t think the fans understood it – or, generally speaking, the people looking at F1.” – the Ferrari boss explained.
Ferrari’s engine department, however, returned to being the reference point of the starting grid at a power unit level in 2022, a performance that began as early as 2021 with the debut of an updated and revolutionary hybrid system – moving to a more advanced electrification technology, with the use of a system that works at 800 volts as compared to the 400 of the previous one – which had already alerted the opponents about the competitiveness of the Ferrari power unit ever since Charles Leclerc used it for the first time last season in the Russian Grand Prix.
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The excellent work on the internal combustion engine during the winter completed the work: “It was a truly fantastic effort by the power unit team”, acknowledged Mattia Binotto who attributed 75% of the growth to the internal combustion V6 and the remaining 25% to the energy recovery system. In 2022 the engines have already been frozen until 2025 as regards to the thermal part – and teams can only intervene for reasons related to reliability – the technicians can still work on the electrical part until 1 September.
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