Ferrari’s 2021 Formula 1 season is clearly much better than the 2020 championship, with the Scuderia currently the protagonist of a battle against McLaren for third place in the constructors’ standings. In spite of the growing performances, the leaders of the Maranello team have repeatedly stated that they would concentrate almost all the resources in favor of the 2022 project, the year in which the Red team aspires to return to the top of the grid by exploiting the extensive rule changes.
The development work on the car that is being created in Maranello does not only concern the chassis and aerodynamic aspects, but also the development of the new power unit. In this regard, Team Principal Mattia Binotto stated that the final races of the current season could be exploited to test directly on the track some of the updates of the Scuderia’s next engine unit:
Formula 1’s rules that were introduced in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic added strict limits in the number of engine upgrades that could be used. And while for last year teams had to stick to the same specification that they ran at the first race of the season, the situation changed for 2021. Instead, the rules state that a single upgrade can be introduced at any moment during the current season that teams choose.
Appendix 2 of F1’s Technical Regulations states about engine development: “From 2021 onwards, it means that one specification update is possible between end of previous season and end of current season.”
This means that it is possible to bring updates for some components, namely engine, turbocharger, batteries and the two electric motogenerators MGU-H and MGU-K, which at the beginning of the 2021 F1 season were the same as in 2020. The Scuderia Ferrari Team Principal added: “By the end of the season we will bring an evolution for those components that will represent a significant leap forward and to gain experience in view of 2022”.
The technical and sporting regulations currently in force establish that it is possible to homologate a single evolutionary step of the power unit per season. As illustrated by Mattia Binotto himself, however, the power unit has several components, the updating of each of which can be approved with different timing. The standard also provides for the possibility of introducing an evolution within 2021, but does not require that this necessarily debut at the beginning of the year, thus leaving the door open to the introduction of a new specification later in the season, as long as the component in question has not been the subject of other innovations during the championship.
By the end of the championship the SF21 will therefore be equipped with a new specification for one or more components of the power unit, although it has not been specified which parts will be affected by this development. The strategy of not homologating a new version of every single component of the turbo-hybrid engine at the beginning of the season reveals the desire to have more time to develop a preliminary version of the 2022 power unit. In this regard Ferrari will be able to gather valuable information to finalize the development of the new power unit during the winter, thus allowing to “gain experience in view of 2022”, quoting Mattia Binotto himself. In fact, such an assessment on track is accompanied by the reduction in the hours of bench tests for engines in 2021, factors that encourage the collection of data on the track.
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With the 2022 power unit Ferrari aims to reduce the performance gap that currently separates the engines of the Prancing Horse from the references of Mercedes and Honda, after having in any case recovered part of the gap with the 2021 engine. Before the engine updates expected for the last part of the championship however, when hostilities resume in Belgium, it is likely that the third engine of the 2021 specification will be installed on the SF21 and a fourth engine by the end of the championship, resulting in a penalty of ten positions on the starting grid. Conversely, the possibility of splitting the mileage of the remaining 12 Grands Prix between two engines could alleviate concerns about reliability and allow the adoption of slightly more aggressive engine mappings.
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