Motorsport Italy wanted to dispel an urban legend about the Ferrari 066/7 engine. It is not true that Wolff Zimmermann split the turbo from the compressor when designing the power unit, as even very authoritative sources and commentators continue to write and say.
The 6-cylinder of the Maranello team, on the other hand, is the last to remain faithful to the more traditional architecture with the entire turbocharging system placed on the exhaust side, while Honda and Renault have copied a solution that Mercedes had already introduced back in 2014 at the beginning of the hybrid era.
Why have so many strange interpretations been made about the power unit of the Ferrari Racing Department? The answer is relatively simple: the engineers of Enrico Gualtieri when defining the “Superfast” have introduced a series of innovations that are not limited to the combustion chamber with new intake ducts capable of creating turbulent motions useful to favor a super-fast ignition, giving more homogeneity to the air-fuel mixture with very fast ignition times.
With the 066/7 power unit, Ferrari also introduced an American-made heat exchanger that is located in the front of the engine, where some thought that there was the turbocharger. In fact, it was easy to be led astray because the intercooler, to facilitate insertion into the rear part of the chassis, was made with a round lower part, so the two carbon ducts that bring fresh and compressed air into each of the plenums placed above the head, seemed to come out of the compressor.
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But a recent report from Motorsport Italy suggests that this is not so: the power unit that was homologated to be used until the end of the 2025 Formula 1 season, important work was done aimed at lowering the center of gravity of the 6 cylinders: turbo, compressor and MGU-H which remain aligned in the same order as the engine of the last year, they were lowered by about fifty millimeters inside the V of the two banks, allowing for a more extreme layout that created two advantages: first, the displacement of the three lower elements; second, a more compact power unit packaging that facilitated the design of a very tapered engine cover for the benefit of a rear wing that needed to be more efficient.
In short, Wolff Zimmerman has tried to recover the power that has been lacking in the last two years which clearly affected the performance of Ferrari in the two-year period 2020-2021 as a result of the secret agreement that the Scuderia had signed with the FIA to close the case of the engine accused of using more fuel than the flow rate allowed by the flow meter, without the alleged irregularity ever being proven, but also thinking about the integration of the V6 turbo inside the F1-75 car.
Splitting the turbo and compressor had been an idea for the Maranello team and the first version of the “Superfast” engine had an architecture of this type planned, but then there was a step backwards in the belief that important results could be achieved even with the standard version.
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