During the 2022 Formula 1 season, the Ferrari F1-75 took 11 pole positions out of 18 races, which shows that the F1 car from Maranello is capable of generating the best performance on a flying lap, especially in the hands of Charles Leclerc.
After all, this was an ambitious project, the result of the original interpretation of the new rules, and an application that no other team has brought to the track, with very wide sidepods to make the most of the aerodynamic flows under and over the body, trying to get the most out of the load generated by the ground effect.
A project that until the Austrian GP, between ups and downs, between errors and reliability problems, had nevertheless allowed Ferrari to believe in the challenge for the 2022 F1 World Championship, with a car that actually seemed the fastest on the grid, even if at almost all the circuits the car had shown to have some difficulties in confirming during the race the excellent performances seen in qualifying.
Since the French Grand Prix, when the FIA began monitoring the famous porpoising levels, the gap between Ferrari and Red Bull has progressively widened. Is this a coincidence, also corresponding to the many updates brought to the track since that time by the Milton Keynes team? The truth probably lies somewhere in between.
How much did the TD-39 directive affect Scuderia Ferrari’s performance?
The TD-39 directive certainly removed the aerodynamic load from the F1-75, a single-seater that, while bouncing, seemed to be a “beast” on track in the first GPs of the 2022 Formula 1 season, as Charles Leclerc had defined it, a distant relative of the unstable car that we saw after the summer break.
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To limit the bouncing, under strict control of the FIA with the new technical directive starting from the disastrous Belgian GP, Ferrari had to lift the car off the ground and was no longer able to exploit the flexible floor (also under strict control), limitations which certainly had a negative impact on a project that had its main advantages in these points. By removing aerodynamic load, the tires are stressed more, they slide, overheat, come out of the correct operating window and therefore degrade in an anomalous way.
After the Japanese Grand Prix, Charles Leclerc admitted that “we were very fast for only four or five laps. The front tires were practically finished after the fifth lap.” A statement that we had already heard on many other occasions, including in the recent Singapore GP. To tell the truth, Mattia Binotto himself had highlighted the problem in a worrying way after the Hungarian GP, when the media pointed the spotlight on the errors in terms of strategy, but the Ferrari team principal was involved in an argument with Italian journalist Carlo Vanzini during his interview for Sky, arguing that the thing which worried him most was “the lack of pace and not the errors of the pit wall”. Perhaps today some look back and agree with Mattia Binotto.
Scuderia Ferrari has also tried on several occasions to compensate for the loss of downforce with more loaded wings, which however damaged it too much in terms of top speed (which was already reduced due to reliability problems), leaving it defenseless from the attacks of the highly efficient Red Bull, which could always run with very low wings thanks to a project that did not suffer from the effects of the new directive, or at least did not suffer after some fundamental updates. Updates that apparently Ferrari could not afford to bring to the track without breaking the budget cap.
The continuous development of the RB18 and the spending limit
We therefore arrive at the second hypothesis, which probably should simply be added to the first to identify the causes of the Ferrari debacle after the summer break. Starting from the Hungarian GP, Red Bull has brought continuous updates to the track, especially on Max Verstappen’s car, from the sidepods to the floor, through the wings and the many expensive updates to bring the car to the low limit in terms of weight allowed by the regulation, gaining very important tenths.
These many updates surprised everyone, especially now in recent weeks when the rumors blew up about the budget cap case that will hopefully end with some penalties following the reports and decisions confirmed on Monday by the FIA . Virtually all the team principals of the other teams, Binotto, Wolff, Steiner, Brown on more than one occasion had pointed out their difficulty in bringing further updates without exceeding the maximum spending limit, and rightly wondered how Red Bull was able to manage this matter.
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