Scuderia Ferrari Team Principal pointed out that the 2022 Formula 1 season is “a clear opportunity” for the Italian side, but at the same time wanted to talk down title ambitions, explaining that the most important thing is continuing to overall improvement.
The Maranello team bounced back after the difficult 2020 championship, when Ferrari had to settle for a disappointing sixth in the Formula 1 Constructor Standings and improved this year to a decent P3, just behind the duo formed by Mercedes and Red Bull, which once againt were leading the field.
The highly anticipated new Formula 1 technical regulations will be introduced from next year, as the sport intends to offer much closer and exciting racing weekends, with the hope of seeing a much more condensed and diverse ranking. Mattia Binotto highlighted that Scuderia Ferrari is not quite at the same lever of “very strong” front-runners and that its goal for next season should be to continue to reduce its deficit.
“We have put a lot of effort on 2022, the priority, it was for us a necessity. If we hadn’t done that, it would be difficult to have a good car or a competitive car in 2022. For us it was more a necessity. Is it giving us full confidence? No we cannot be confident. We have no references from the others. What we know is that we have put all our effort. Whatever we have is the best result of a team effort. And that’s important to us. What will be important for us next year is to keep on growing. And it is to further reduce the gap to the competitors. The new regulations are a clear opportunity. The hope is to be competitive and for me to be competitive is to be in the position of winning races.Would that mean that we can fight for a championship? If I look at today, the gap is still big. But as Ferrari, it’s part of our DNA. What is important is to be capable of fighting at least in some races for pole and for the win. That is the simple consequence of continuous growing and improvement. I would be disappointed if we have not improved [compared] to this year.” – he explained.
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Scuderia Ferrari is putting its hopes in an improved power unit for 2022, as the Maranello team plans to get involved in the fight for race wins at least on some tracks. Ferrari accelerated the introduction of a new hybrid in the second part of the 2021 Formula One championship to be able to further evaluate its potential and focused most of the team’s resources on this development for 2022:
“The power unit is significantly different to the current one, except the hybrid. For the hybrid what we introduced in 2021, we anticipated what would have been the 2022 [specification]. There will be some changes to the hybrid system for 2022 as first for the regulations because more sensors are acquired from FIA in all the systems for better promising. But the overall system is very similar to the one we raced at the end of the season. But the rest, especially on the internal combustion engine, I have to say is significantly different. We’ve got a new fuel, which is the 10% ethanol, which changed a lot the combustion. Just considering that different fuel, whatever is the supplier so he’s not down to the supplier, but we are losing more or less 20 horsepower, which means somehow the combustion itself is quite changed. So there were a lot of opportunities in development on the power unit and we changed it quite a lot, especially in the design of the combustion itself. On the chassis, what can we innovate? I think that the way we approach the exercise was really open-minded and when looking at the car concept, what was possible or not – which is not only the external shapes but whatever you could have done under the bodywork in terms of layout, in terms of suspension design, in terms of the architecture, including as well the power architecture. I think that the team made significant innovations and the overall design that we are now formalising is quite different to the 2021 project.” – the Ferrari boss concluded.
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