With the homologation of the latest hybrid system version on the Ferrari 066/7 power unit, the Italian side has definitively frozen the engine that it will use until the end of the 2025 Formula 1 championship: for three years the engine designed by Wolf Zimmermann will remain the same if not for changes that the FIA will grant to improve reliability.
The same is obviously true for other manufacturers (Mercedes, Renault and Red Bull-Honda). The Maranello power unit used at Monza in the Italian GP was credited with 1,024 horsepower, a reference power value in line with Honda and Mercedes and with the French engine manufacturer not far away, but still behind.
The FIA had hoped that all engine manufacturers would be more or less on the same level before the power unit development freeze, in order to stop the research for the parts that are blocked, with the goal of reducing costs and also direct the attention towards the budget cap for next year.
The financial regulation for 2023 will impose a spending limit set at 95 million dollars per year until 2025, while with the introduction of the new PU in 2026 the threshold will be raised to 130 million dollars.
The Ferrari staff led by Enrico Gualtieri, therefore, is redundant with respect to the needs that the Ferrari Sports Management will have to face in the next three years: it will no longer be necessary to produce one hundred engines per season, occupying the test benches for many tests or allocating experimental cells to the engines in search of performance.
In short, in the next three years, the power unit will lose its strategic value and the search for performance will be more focused on the chassis and aerodynamics, even if there will be attempts to improve the power unit as much as possible by exploiting the limit of reliability, trying to improve the efficiency of the single-seater also passing through a reduction of the radiant masses which can be valid both in weight saving and in less drag
But it is inevitable that the manufacturers involved in F1 will have to significantly reduce their workforce to align with the new needs. Ferrari took note of this and during the week Mattia Binotto talked about it with all the parties involved to build a plan in which to study how to relocate the staff to a different department.
It is true that the design area has already been oriented towards the power unit of 2026, but the thermal unit that will replace the current one will have so many regulation limitations (size, common parts and choices towards more primordial and less extreme solutions), while the electrical part that will have to guarantee the recovery of 50% of the power (to reach the usual thousand horses required) will be designed with less freedom, to facilitate the approach of new brands such as Audi and Porsche (but not only).
Mercedes, for example, is not replenishing the workforce after the massive exits of engineers to Red Bull Powertrains, but is selecting figures only in strategic roles. It seems that Audi, which is preparing for entry into F1, has also begun to reach out to the specialists from Brixworth, also looking in Maranello.
Formula 1 has entered a phase of great transformation where the key word is efficiency: in the diversification of activities that make it possible not to lose high-cost training skills, Mercedes has launched a plan for research on ecological aircraft fuels, while it would have started to also work on the developing of e-fuel, relying, it seems, on a financing promoted to 50% by the European Commission.
The world of engines manufacturers is a world in great evolution: the e-fuel with zero fossils that Formula 1 will adopt from 2026 is a strategic tool that could extend the life of internal combustion engines well beyond 2035, a term obtusely placed by politics.
Synthetic fuel exists, it could have a sustainable cost, but at the moment nobody produces it in the quantities necessary to satisfy a market. The main problem to be solved is that and, in spite of Aramco, which has a “vision” of the future, oil companies prefer to extract crude oil to produce electricity, rather than converting to green hydrogen.
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