Mattia Binotto, Ferrari team manager, has decided to take a chance. The team manager has chosen that in 2022 the Italian house will have a ground-effect car that will adopt a power unit with highly innovative solutions to break with the recent past and try to regain leadership in the power section.
This is a very brave operation because it will not be without risks: according to rumors leaking from Maranello, next year’s car will be born with a completely new supercharger system.
Wolf carpenter, who has been entrusted with the development of the power unit for the new technical regulation, intends to separate the supercharger from the turbo, adopting the configuration that Mercedes has followed since the beginning of the hybrid era in 2014, placing the former at the front of the six-cylinder combustion engine, and the second at the rear. Currently, both elements are grouped in the spectrum of the gearbox.
Naturally, according to the regulations, the two elements will be connected by an axis, following a technical approach that was developed by the star brand, but then also followed by Honda.
Ferrari, however, will not limit itself to copying an architecture, because it will try to push research in the direction of an unprecedented solution, which tries to bring the compressor inside the 6-cylinder intake box, and with a new intercooler arrangement. .
The Cavallino engineers, therefore, would be experimenting with a truly unusual concept that could also lead to the renunciation of the variable geometry horn system, thanks to which it is possible to find the appropriate power delivery to the different engine speeds.
The objective is to have an engine as powerful as the others, but with a power unit that drastically favors aerodynamics, limiting the drag that was one of the serious defects of the SF1000.
In short, Ferrari would launch a kind of miniaturization of the upper part of the engine that would also mean significant weight savings: we are talking about something never seen in Formula 1 with great risks from the point of view of reliability, since it is of a completely new solution that will take time to develop and adjust.
In the working group that leads Enrico Gualtieri some would have preferred to design a more traditional power unit, based on the engine that will be mounted on the SF21, but the constraints dictated by the limited time available and, above all, due to the introduction of the budget limit and the limitations of the benchmarks, it was necessary to make the decision to follow a single development direction.
And we must recognize Mattia Binotto for the guts of having bet on the future, fully aware that the 2022 power unit will not evolve throughout the year and that it could freeze.
It is too obvious that Maranello has decided to take a risk, but if Ferrari has the ambition to return to the top to challenge Mercedes on equal terms, it must once again be the protagonist with technical choices that could create quite a trend within the category.
It has been said that in recent years too conservative decisions have been made in the competition department, so now they will bet on a concept conceived in collaboration with AvL, the Austrian company from Graz that for years has been associated with the prancing Horse.