The 2022 Formula 1 World Championship represents a very important opportunity for Scuderia Ferrari. The F1-75 project has all the credentials to fight for title and win it, a scenario that realistically has not happened since 2007 for the drivers ‘championship and 2008 for the constructors’ championship. Errors aside, the competitiveness of Ferrari allows Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz to fight in every race for the top step of the podium. In this respect, despite Charles Leclerc’s DNF and Carlos Sainz’s “poor” fourth place, recent updates have produced the desired results.
There is a factor, however, that in the last few hours has created a lot of tension throughout the Ferrari Racing Department. This is the issue of reliability, a crucial factor in achieving the desired results. While other customer teams had already faced engine issues in the first races of the 2022 Formula One season, for Ferrari the first failure of the 066/7 power unit took place at the worst possible moment, after 27 laps of the Spanish Grand Prix, while Charles Leclerc was on his way to a clear victory at the Circuit de Catalunya in Barcelona.
Although the awareness of having a competitive car partly reassures the Maranello team for the near future, the alarm bells linked to the “reliability” of the power unit have sounded peremptorily. On the other hand, the strengths of a single-seater are measured on various fronts and undoubtedly the mechanical solidity is a crucial element in this sense.
The statements made to Sky Sport UK by team principal Mattia Binotto, regarding the failure of the engine on the Monegasque’s car on Sunday, are very alarming in relation to the extent of the problem: “We still don’t have an explanation for the sudden engine problem, but it’s definitely a reliability issue. The engine will return to Maranello during the night and in the morning we will dismantle it to assess the damage caused”.
According to the information gathered by funoanalisitecnica.com, the Italian technicians carried out various checks through the sensors, devices that during the weekend were not able to predict how some components external to the thermal structure, strictly related to the operation of the turbocharger and the hybrid part, could affect reliability up to creating malfunctions and, consequently, Charles Leclerc’s premature retirement from the Spanish Grand Prix in the F1-75.
The official Ferrari explanation, made public late Monday afternoon, expresses the “satisfaction” of Mattia Binotto in noting that, the failure suffered during the race on number 16, was not related to design errors and / or poor reliability of the parts in question. Excluding design errors and structural defects means moving the cause of the failure elsewhere. The MGU-H and the turbocharger, therefore, could have been “victims” of a failure whose origin stems from the operating temperatures of the PU which were too high. This scenario is of great concern to the Ferrari management who, despite the communications which were made to minimize the issue, will try to understand and resolve the unfortunate situation that has occurred in Spain and classify it as an “isolated case”.
With the arrival of summer and the consequent high temperature, the need to manage the overheating of the mechanical components becomes even more important. This is why, apparently, some aerodynamic studies are being examined to bring a greater amount of flow to the sidepods, in an attempt to keep the elements of the Italian power unit in the correct operating window. By broadening the analysis to the teams that have the Ferrari engines, the issue of reliability begins to be really crucial in a phase of the championship in which the competitors are going to extract greater performance from their respective technical projects.
In this regard, the number of components of the power unit used on Valtteri Bottas’ Alfa Romeo, which reached the limit of replacements after only six Grands Prix, is emblematic, both in terms of the turbo compressor and the MGU-H motor generators. On the Montmelò circuit, three Ferrari power units suffered from various problems: first on the Alfa Romeo of the Finnish Valtteri Bottas in free practice on Friday, then on the Alfa of the Chinese Zhou Guanyu and finally on Charles Leclerc’s F1-75 car on Sunday afternoon in Barcelona.
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The leap in performance of the Ferrari power unit compared to last year was truly incredible, bringing the technological leadership in the engine sector back to Maranello three years after the extraordinary, as well as much discussed, turbo-hybrid unit used on the SF-90. The men in red are aware that world championship ambitions cannot be separated from reliability, especially given that the challenger is an increasingly consistent and fast Red Bull.
The hope for the “reassuring” press release from the Italian team bodes well for the fans, as they wait to verify the accuracy of the explanations provided by Ferrari for the troubles suffered in Spain. On the other hand, during the next rounds of the Formula 1 2022 world championship, a consistency of performance is expected. Because as we all know, the imaginary thin line between victory and defeat is strongly linked to the reliability factor.
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