The Formula 1 pre-season testing sessions have always been misleading given the fact that teams try their best to hide the potential and true pace of their car until the first round of the season. But in 2022, even more than in previous years, the official winter testing session is more difficult to evaluate as media experts attempt to outline a first scale of values based on the data and events seen on the track.
The new rules and technical regulations for the 2022 Formula 1 season have led to a completely new generation of cars which require a lot of work from the teams in order to properly understood them and therefore be able to get maximum performance. While all teams still work on their evaluations without showing their true pace, many teams – including Mercedes and Red Bull – have indicated Scuderia Ferrari as the most successful car seen so far both at the Circuit de Catalunya testing session and in Sakhir during the last few days.
In Maranello they obviously try to minimize such indications, talking about strategy on the part of their rivals to unload all the pressure on them in view of the first round of the season, but in any case the F1-75 seems to at least be te best balaned car and showed no reliability problems. Lap times, however, must not be deceiving: Carlos Sainz himself, in fact, underlined how much more attention should be paid to GPS data than to time performance, which yesterday saw Magnussen’s Haas in front of everyone.
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But why is GPS important? “From here we understand the way in which the power unit is working, analyzing the speed profiles (which indicate the torque) and the maximum speeds. If the curve is sudden you are using power, otherwise it means that you are going into a sort of ‘diesel mode’ – explained engineer Luigi Mazzola for the Italian daily newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport – “I don’t think the teams are hiding that much, in reality they are just trying to understand their cars. This is why I see a Ferrari that is more ready in some aspects, more aware of what it has in its hand. The others, on the other hand, are a little further behind. The new regulation totally changes the way the car is set up and interpreted because the aerodynamics have totally changed and are no longer so constant depending on the surface. If you remove the aerodynamics from the wings and move it to the floor, you make it dependent on height and speed. The driver must understand what happens and if you add the porpoising effect you end up in confusion. It seems to me the case of Mercedes”. – explained Luigi Mazzola, who joined Ferrari’s racing department in 1988 as a race engineer and concluded his experience with the Maranello team in 2009 as coordinating director of performance development
So, for the former Maranello engineer, it is not a gamble to say that Ferrari has a good chance of being there in front of the fight: “I’m just saying that Ferrari are the most ready, but Red Bull is strong too. Mercedes is in a bit more trouble, but you can’t bet on performance yet.” – he concluded.
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