In Miami, Ferrari had already introduced the second power unit on all six cars powered by the Maranello team, therefore the new engine made its debut in the fifth race of the season: in addition to the F1-75 cars of Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz also the Alfa Romeo cars of Valtteri Bottas and Guanyu Zhou and the Haas of Mick Schumacher and Kevin Magnussen started using PU2 (out of the three allowed by the regulation) to which some changes related to reliability had been made.
Yesterday in Barcelona, however, the power unit 2 betrayed both Charles Leclerc and Guanyu Zhou. For the Alfa Romeo driver, the problem is linked to overheating, which is why Valtteri Bottas also saw the Grand Prix in Saudi Arabia end prematurely (it is the Finnish driver’s only race without points in this good start to the 2022 Formula 1 season). However, Valtteri Bottas himself had also encountered a problem with the engine in free practice on Friday. Charles Leclerc spoke on the radio about a turbo problem, but only the investigations in place at Maranello will be able to identify exactly what went wrong with the engine of the F1-75 car.
Certainly it is unlikely for Charles Leclerc to be able to reuse the power unit, at least as hinted by team principal Mattia Binotto at the final press conference held in the evening at Barcelona: “If we can recover the power unit? I have no idea, but it’s very difficult if you stop like that. We will see after the analyzes, maybe we will no longer be able to use a couple of components and recover the others”.
Next weekend we race in Monaco, but it is above all the following two races that are worrying Ferrari after this power unit issue. In Baku and Canada, engines will count a lot and will be put under stress as straights in Azerbaijan and Montreal abound. Other problems and retirements have to be avoided, also because the current situation linked to the Ferrari engine ‘fleet’ suggests that in the second part of the 2022 Formula 1 season it will be necessary to incur some penalties on the starting grid, while Max Verstappen is still using the first engine unit which has already covered six full race weekends.
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