The first week of testing took on a familiar theme as Mercedes dominated, Red Bull teased some impressive pace and Scuderia Ferrari failed to meet. Mercedes’ rivals must now hope the world champions don’t have more tricks up their sleeves for the second week. It was clear that Mercedes, unlike Red Bull and Ferrari, got straight down to performance work this week and the fact it used the fastest tyre compound to set its quickest times helps account for the worrying void in lap time between the Silver Arrows and the rest of the field.expectations.
After Scuderia Ferrari flattered to deceive in testing last year, the Italian team is taking an entirely different approach to F1’s preseason in 2020. The focus is firmly on cross referencing factory simulations with the reality of track running to make sure there are no surprises when the SF1000 is unleashed in a competitive environment next month. As a result, we haven’t seen the red cars attempt anything comparable with Mercedes’ chart-topping lap times and instead they are languishing at the bottom of the timesheets.
It seems a good chunk of Ferrari’s lap time loss can be attributed to running in low power engine modes last week, as Mark Hughes explains for the-race.com:
“Scuderia fans depressed about the apparently dire lack of one-lap pace can rest a bit easier in the knowledge that comparisons made possible by Mercedes’ race simulations on Thursday and those of Ferrari and Red Bull on Friday show a vastly more competitive SF1000.” – he wrote.
“Ferrari did not do a full race sim, but Sebastian Vettel made an opening stint simulation on Friday morning that was of the exact same number of laps as the opening stints of Hamilton and Verstappen’s race sims. The comparison is not perfect, for the general feeling was that the track conditions of Friday were slightly more conducive to fast times than those of Thursday. This will have flattered Ferrari and Red Bull relative to Mercedes but nonetheless that race-starting stint simulation of Vettel’s compares extremely closely to Hamilton’s from the day before – and is much better than Verstappen’s conducted at much the same time.”
The Ferrari’s best single lap of the test was a 1m17.5s. If we assume that to have been set with a qualifying-level of fuel (in reality it would probably be carrying at least 30kg for the purposes of testing), then the 4.3s difference between that and the 1m 21.78s Vettel begins the stint with represents over 100kg. Which would be a race-starting stint. After a 16-lap stint, the fuel load would be around 25kg lighter (around 0.9s-worth).
“So, how come there is ‘only’ a 4.3s gap between the Ferrari’s best single lap and its pace at the beginning of the ‘race-start’ whereas the difference is far greater for Mercedes and Red Bull, which lapped in a best of 1m15.7s and 1m16.4s respectively? The answer to this brings us to the nub of why Ferrari has so far been trailing at the back of the pack in terms of single lap pace. GPS analysis suggests that Ferrari is running its engine in a very restrictive mode – even compared to the identical engines in the Alfa-Romeo and Haas cars.”
Click here to read Mark Hughes’ full article
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