On Sunday an extremely reduced version of the Formula 1 tests ended, a three-day event from which the teams had to extract as much information as possible after the important floor and diffuser changes dictated by the regulations.
Ferrari was certainly one of the special observers. After a disastrous 2020, the fans are hoping for a great revival of a team with a history and a palmares worthy of much better results than last season’s debacle. No chair is hotter than that of Mattia Binotto, who is at a very important crossroads in his career: another failure would not be tolerated by the Ferrari management, so the Italian-Swiss team principal and the engineers working for him will have to do their best to put on the track an SF21 that can compete at the top while continuing the design of the revolutionary 2022 car.
Power Unit: last chance before freezing
The most important knot to be solved was that of the Power Unit. After the secret agreement with the FIA following an unspecified breach of regulation in 2019, Ferrari had to run the 2020 season with an engine that looked as if it had been weakened, with deleterious consequences for Ferrari’s performance and of all customer teams. Hence, much of the effort of the Maranello team has focused on developing a new power unit. Mattia Binotto, at the end of the tests, said he was optimistic about the performance of the new engine, which in any case had already been extensively tested “on the bench”: “Looking at the first days of testing” he said “it seems to me that the top speed is satisfactory. We didn’t encounter the same disadvantage as last year”.
Sure, the top speed seems in line with the other teams, but it is difficult to evaluate a similar parameter during the tests, where neither the fuel loads nor the engine settings of the various teams are known.
However, there is no doubt that the power unit made in Maranello has shown encouraging reliability. A small combustion anomaly put an end to Charles Leclerc’s first test session a few minutes before the time was up; according to the Monegasque’s statements, the car was stopped on the track for precautionary reasons only. But overall, Ferrari and its engines are among the teams that have covered the most laps ever, with Alfa Romeo, backed by a tireless 41-year-old Kimi Raikkonen, at the top of this particular classification with 422 laps. Net of Charles Leclerc’s stop, the Ferrari engine performed very well and allowed the teams that mount it to spend more time on the track than their competitors.
Unstable rear of Ferrari F1
But the Power Unit wasn’t the only problem with the SF1000. The unstable rear that in 2020 several times left the drivers with their nose facing the wrong direction of the track was another great area of attention for the technicians: “We tried to develop the rear as much as possible. I believe that these days it ha been important to understand the correlation between the wind tunnel and the simulations, collecting data and comparing them” Mattia Binotto said.
Scuderia Ferrari has spent its two development tokens on the rear and expects great results from the new shape of the gearbox and rear suspension. Although Carlos Sainz was the protagonist of a couple of spins, Charles Leclerc said he was satisfied with the behavior of the car on the track. There is no doubt that the floor cuts have changed the balance of downforce on the cars and some teams may struggle more than others to find the feeling with the new cars. To tell the truth, other teams appeared more in difficulty than Ferrari in this regard, including Mercedes: “Mercedes in 2020 had wings with very little outwash, which means a lot of load behind and a lot of load in front, the opposite of Ferrari, which had more load on the rear and a less on the front” – said engineer Alberto Aimar at Formula 1 Garage. “With the downforce cut, which is essentially all concentrated on the rear axle, cars that develop a lot of load even at the front are put into crisis more because at that moment the front becomes the strongest axle and therefore essentially the one that goes into crisis later in the curves. This means that the centrifugal force is able to act more and sooner on the rear axle, which is now no longer so firm. This could be Mercedes’ problem.”
In short, Ferrari would have a previous aerodynamic advantage dictated by its low front load conformation inherited from the SF1000. However, the worries are related to the heavy tire degradation that Ferrari showed in the race pace simulations, but once again the tests may not represent a true picture of this parameter. Furthermore, Ferrari seems to have recovered engine performance, but it is not yet known how much the other teams have improved. To get an idea of the real competitiveness of the car, it will be necessary to wait for the first round of the championship, on the weekend of 27 March.
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