Can Ferrari maintain its F1 title push?

Excelling in Bahrain and Australia to win two of the opening three races of a new season. That strike rate at the dawn of Formula 1’s second ground-effect era might offer Ferrari its best chance to end the 14-year drought since it last collected a drivers’ or constructors’ championship trophy. Or perhaps the run of form seems familiar. For it’s also the way the Prancing Horse bolted out of the gate in both 2017 and 2018 before ultimately falling short. The question again then should be, can Ferrari see it through?

Given a record-breaking 23 races are still planned for this term as and when a replacement for the Russian Grand Prix is revealed, the true answer won’t be known for some time. But plenty of positive indicators can already be spotted. Initially, F1’s oldest team appears to have cut the factors that caused its recent realistic title bids to fail. Plus, the F1-75 seems a well-natured beast that has more to offer, rather than a troubled bucking bronco with stunted growth.

The latest Maranello creation has so far avoided the major pitfall of 2017: unreliability. Sebastian Vettel led the points with only eight races to run as he diced with Lewis Hamilton to claim a fifth drivers’ crown. On the team’s home soil at Monza, round 13 of 20, the SF70H simply didn’t have an answer to the pace of the Mercedes. Next time out in Singapore came the infamous startline tangle with stablemate Kimi Raikkonen and Max Verstappen, when the Red Bull ended up as the unsavoury filling in a Ferrari sandwich.

Then the true Achilles’ heel was exposed. There was a grid penalty for an engine change in Malaysia; a spark plug issue forced a retirement in Japan; before another off-colour weekend in the US. That heaped the pressure on for Mexico, where Vettel made first-lap contact with Verstappen then Hamilton. The German came away with front-wing damage, the Brit with a puncture. But Hamilton’s advantage was already enough to collect the title spoils with two races to spare. Vettel wound up 46 points short.

The driver hadn’t covered himself in glory particularly, and neither was the Ferrari dependable enough. Wind on half a decade and, as Mercedes still seeks to unlock its W13, Red Bull has proved Ferrari’s closest challenger. But its pair of RB18s only have a 50% finish record so far this season thanks to the double DNF in Bahrain and Verstappen pulling up in Australia with another fuel system fault. By comparison, the F1-75 has been relatively robust. The steering wheel glitch for Carlos Sainz Jr on the grid at Albert Park caused the most notable scare. Otherwise, it seems there’s a remedy for the shortcoming of 2017.

“Reliability is part of the performance,” says team principal Mattia Binotto. “To finish first, first you need to finish. It’s something on which we are always keeping a really high priority. At the end of the championship, will that be a key factor? Certainly. It will be as much as overall performance is a key factor. All the elements need to be properly in place to win a championship.”

Ferrari team principal Binotto embraces Leclerc after his Bahrain GP win. Since then, he's finished no lower than second

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

It was lead driver Vettel who largely allowed the 2018 decorations to get away. That season represented the last time Ferrari was a serious contender, with the squad leading both points tables after 10 races. But then he crashed out in the now infamous wet German GP as Hamilton won from 14th. He was second in Hungary and won in Belgium, but never topped the table thereafter. Vettel spun in Italy while fighting Hamilton on lap one, before a hat-trick of races where Maranello slipped behind Mercedes’ and Red Bull’s pace.

Ferrari messed up its qualifying strategy in Japan, hoping to pounce by putting its drivers on intermediate tyres for Q3. Only the rain arrived too late, by which time rivals had set their banker laps in drier conditions to leave Vettel starting down in eighth. Hamilton led Valtteri Bottas for a Mercedes front-row lockout.

Vettel then spun battling Verstappen and copped a penalty in the US for failing to slow sufficiently under a red flag to drop to fifth on the grid and fourth in the race. Meanwhile, Raikkonen picked up his final F1 win Stateside and outperformed his team-mate again in Brazil with a podium. It proved the Ferrari was largely good enough, but Vettel was letting the charge falter. Hamilton didn’t have to be asked twice to wrap up perhaps his most impressive crown.

Leclerc’s mistakes across 2019-21 arrived when he was plying his trade in cars that were far from the benchmark up against the Mercedes and Red Bull. The F1-75 and its broad operating window is yet to force Leclerc down that risky route

As for 2022, while Sainz reckons he and his engineers have found areas of untapped potential to close the gap to Leclerc, his spin into the gravel in Australia has created a 38-point deficit to his table-topping team-mate. With that, he has quickly made himself the tacit number two. Therefore, the internal focus must be on Leclerc, who many already consider to be the championship favourite. And so far, he is showing he has developed into a driver who can avoid the mistakes Vettel came to rue in 2018.

The Monegasque has barely put a foot wrong. His two successes prior to 2022 arrived in the consecutive Belgian and Italian GPs in 2019. In both, he almost cracked under the ever-growing pressure that the chasing Hamilton then Bottas were applying in the closing stages. Twice, Leclerc crossed the line with less than a second to spare. So far this term, he has proved his credentials in wheel-to-wheel combat with Verstappen, notably outwitting his Dutch foe in Bahrain.

In Australia, Leclerc demonstrated the breadth of his skillset by taking command of proceedings and never looking as though he might let first place slip. Pole, victory, fastest lap and leading from start to finish was the first grand slam for a Ferrari driver since Fernando Alonso in the 2010 Singapore GP.

What’s more, Leclerc’s mistakes across 2019-21 arrived when he was plying his trade in cars that were far from the benchmark up against the Mercedes and Red Bull. He had to take greater risks to put himself in contention. The F1-75 and its broad operating window – it hasn’t gone off the boil at any of Sakhir, Jeddah or Albert Park – is yet to force Leclerc down that risky route.

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“I’ve had a growth from year to year that is linear,” says Leclerc. “I have a mindset that is just focusing on myself, on the job I have to do in the car, and not thinking too much about results and all that is around. Obviously seeing the last few years that have been very difficult, and now to be back at the top, gives a lot of motivation to the whole team, to me. It’s good to be here.”

Leclerc controlled proceedings in Australia to open up a 38-point lead over team-mate Sainz in the points

Photo by: Carl Bingham / Motorsport Images

Given how calculating, clean and quick Leclerc has been, there’s no looming threat that he will slip up and endure a flurry of errors like those that cost Vettel dearly. But relying on reliability plus the lead driver not repeating the mistakes of the past won’t necessarily get Ferrari over the line as and when the Red Bulls stop expiring. The team also needs to ensure it can consistently get the better of its chief rival by outdeveloping (or at least matching) the opposition design team led by Adrian Newey.

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To see how Ferrari has fared in this respect in recent years, ‘supertimes’ offer a sound baseline. Here, the fastest lap set during an entire grand prix weekend earns a perfect score of 0.000 and the remaining nine teams earn a percentage over that benchmark. For example, after three races this season, Ferrari has an average score of 0.009, after setting the standard in Bahrain and Australia. Red Bull is next best with 0.168, and the leading duo have put clear air between themselves and Mercedes’ 0.932 effort.

For the sake of brevity, the broad strokes reflect that Ferrari is a touch hit-and-miss. In 2017 and 2018, it ended the season further off the pace than it had started, suggesting it lost the development race to the yardsticks planted by Mercedes. Ferrari’s major mid-season gain arrived in 2019, but that can be attributed to its controversial fuel sensor configuration that was later outlawed via a series of FIA technical directives. It subsequently started 2020 in the doldrums – it ended up closer but had more to gain – and, in 2021, didn’t develop its package to instead pool its resources into the radical shift to ground-effects.

That inconsistency should be a cause for concern given that, thus far in 2022, the main opposition is Red Bull. Even though the Milton Keynes operation didn’t face the pressure of truly being in the heat of a title battle, it enjoyed more consistent improvement throughout the 2017, 2019 and 2020 campaigns per the ‘supertimes’. And despite the data showing that Red Bull fell behind the curve in 2018, that campaign can realistically be added to the successful list. The RB14 was arguably the finest chassis come season’s end. The Renault power unit unreliability in the second half disguises the upward trajectory, and the partnership ended thereafter.

The 2021 season was a murkier barometer. Red Bull was outshone by Mercedes as the Silver Arrows recovered from revised floor regulations to take the fight between Hamilton and Verstappen down to the wire. Meanwhile, Ferrari abandoned upgrading its car, hoping to steal an early march in 2022. That strategy call can now end its erratic development trend.

Mainly, Ferrari has much more in its arsenal this year courtesy of the revised Aerodynamic Testing Regulations that are now applied on a sliding scale depending on how a team fares in the constructors’ table at key points in the season. Ferrari was a paltry sixth in 2020 as its fuel flow quirk was canned. It was fourth midway through 2021, behind McLaren when the June cut-off arrived for the ATR. The upshot was that, to prepare for arguably the greatest aerodynamic overhaul in F1 history, Ferrari had 168 more windtunnel runs at its disposal than either Mercedes or Red Bull, and 1050 CFD items in hand.

Ferrari wasn't in the same fight as Red Bull last year, and has benefitted from increased windtunnel allocation as a result

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

That promising position is bolstered by the internal tweaks that Ferrari has made. As Sainz says: “It’s been a few tough years for Ferrari. And these tough years, we’ve used them to rebuild a bit the team in the internal side, to try and make ourselves stronger, become better at what we do. We’ve used the regulation change of having to start from zero, and a blank piece of paper, to use this improvement in the way we work to put it into practice and suddenly be back at the top.  

“I’ve always believed that Ferrari had the right people and the right mindset to be where we are right now. But we needed a blank sheet of paper because Red Bull and Mercedes with the previous regulations, they just had a very big advantage on the rest of the field. And we felt like that gap was very difficult to cut back without a reset. This reset has given us the opportunity and we’ve used it in a very good way. So now, it’s our job to keep ourselves up there.”

Since Ferrari declared it was focusing on the shift to ground-effect, it’s highly unlikely to have wasted much of its aero allowance on a lacklustre 2021. Mercedes and Red Bull, by contrast, fought down to the wire. And although the red cars eventually usurped the papaya ones for third in the charts last season, Ferrari retains a greater ATR allowance than Mercedes and Red Bull until June at least.

Mercedes and Red Bull cannot throw an endless amount of cash (or windtunnel time) at their initial problems to resolve them, hoping to persevere through a bewildering array of tweaks to floors, sidepods and wings until they find the optimum solution

That provides it with more capacity to develop during this crucial early stage, as everyone works to understand the real-world traits of the new breed of machinery. In other words, Ferrari is currently top of the pile and should have more in reserve than Mercedes and Red Bull to keep it there at a time when the learning curve for all teams is at its steepest.

It’s not just the shake-up of the ATR and the radical technical revamp where the rules might have played into Ferrari’s favour in its quest for silverware. The budget cap can work to its advantage also. It means Mercedes and Red Bull cannot throw an endless amount of cash (or windtunnel time) at their initial problems to resolve them, hoping to persevere through a bewildering array of tweaks to floors, sidepods and wings until they find the optimum solution. They must be leaner. Ferrari faces this limitation also, of course but, by the current form book, is starting from the better baseline.

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That brings us to what Leclerc and Sainz already have at their disposal, a car that provides a great deal of optimism in the bids for drivers’ and constructors’ glory. So much so, Leclerc has already acknowledged he is in the title picture, saying: “We’ve got a very strong car. A very reliable car too… so I hope it continues like this. If it does, we probably have chances for the championship, which obviously makes me smile after the last two years that have been difficult for the team and obviously for myself.”

Testing at Barcelona included, the car appears to have worked at all four circuits visited so far. Leclerc’s dominance at Albert Park might be considered an outlier given the track was resurfaced, but there’s been no major flux in competitiveness across abrasive Bahrain and low-downforce Jeddah either. Only at the latter did Red Bull have an obvious trump card with its top-end straightline performance, which might leave Ferrari more vulnerable at higher-speed venues such as Baku (and, dare we suggest, at home at Monza).

Red Bull won out courtesy of greater straightline speed in Jeddah, where DRS zones also played a part in Verstappen overhauling Leclerc late on

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

But in the main, the evidence so far suggests a wide operating window to reduce the risk of the F1-75 embarking on a protracted run of poor form. It also implies that Ferrari is operationally slick – not rusty after its years away from the cut and thrust of a championship fight – since there have been no clangers with car set-up that have allowed results to bleed away.

The machinery is not infallible, however. The most obvious and striking weakness carried by the F1-75 is its penchant for porpoising, with the oscillations rearing their head again rather prominently in Australia. But, unlike Mercedes, this rocking motion is only occurring at the end of straights rather than compromising balance through higher-speed corners. So, while it costs a small amount of time and does the Pirelli tyres no favours, it’s not proved to be a critical flaw. That stops mechanics jacking up the rideheight to lose precious downforce.

Despite the violent-looking onboard replays, it is manageable in the cockpit, says Leclerc: “It’s definitely something we want to tackle because it doesn’t help us for consistency, especially once you have bouncing in a corner. We need to work on that. But [in Australia], it wasn’t an issue. Or, I couldn’t have gone faster if I didn’t have the bouncing.”

In view of the spending and windtunnel restrictions, Ferrari is already acting with caution. Aside from some low-drag fettling for Jeddah, it has so far brought only one upgraded part to the table in 2022. Unlike what was effectively a Mercedes ‘W13B’ breaking cover in Bahrain, or Red Bull sporting updated sidepods at the test, Ferrari has kept things modest while fully understanding a package it has maintained since day one at Barcelona. The tweak it donned in Australia was a modified diffuser, but that was only used in Friday practice. It is understood that this was simply to gather data to correlate with future, more sweeping developments without committing to burning through the ATR allocation.

There’s further evidence of Ferrari’s pragmatic upgrade tactics in so far as it won’t usher in an array of changes this weekend at Imola, a home race and the first European round of the season, easing the logistical headache of freighting new parts. As a sprint weekend, a practice session is cut from the schedule and qualifying arrives a day early to limit the troubleshooting time.

“We believe it will not be the right place,” explains Binotto. “We will try to mitigate the issues we’ve got still so far – I’m thinking of the porpoising. We again try to work on that specific point. But for the upgrades and more, let me say a significant one, it will be for later on in the season.”

It’s all rather sensible. The question will be whether Ferrari is exercising too much caution. Given Verstappen’s unreliability in Bahrain and Australia, his dissatisfaction with the RB18’s balance at the latter, plus struggles on the hard tyres in Jeddah, he and his team are yet to execute the perfect weekend. Particularly given Red Bull’s new-found prowess in a straight line and track record at developing a chassis, Ferrari must remain on the front foot for when its key rival inevitably stitches everything together.

Ferrari needs to remain aggressive in development to keep the team in the mix when Red Bull manages to hook a weekend together

Photo by: Carl Bingham / Motorsport Images

For how the rest of the season plays out, Sainz and Leclerc have slightly differing views. Sainz acknowledges that Red Bull and Mercedes “are the favourite, because we haven’t been in a title fight in the last few years. In the previous years, these teams have outdeveloped Ferrari, so we are still super-cautious.”

Leclerc is a touch more assured: “To keep up with Red Bull in terms of development is going to be difficult, but [at Ferrari] it’s the same team that did this car, that will work on the development for this year’s car, so I am confident. There is no reason for us to be on the back foot because the guys at Maranello have done a great job building up this car for this year.

Leclerc has observed the changes going on behind closed doors for four years now, so it’s reasonable to expect his confidence to be well-placed. That progress is now complemented by his own evolution as a driver in the combined effort to reach the F1 summit

“There are some developments coming and I’m confident that it will go in the right direction. So, I wouldn’t focus too much on the others. I think we need to focus on ourselves. Since the last two years, I really see a jump in the way we’ve analysed every weekend, in the way we have identified our weaknesses and how quick we were to react to try and get better in the places where we were struggling. I am confident the team can do a great job with development this year.”

Leclerc has observed the changes going on behind closed doors for four years now, so it’s reasonable to expect his confidence to be well-placed. That progress is now complemented by his own evolution as a driver in the combined effort to reach the F1 summit.

Ferrari is no stranger to false dawns in the turbo-hybrid era, but often that promise has arrived in testing only to fizzle out when the proper competition starts. In 2022, though, the good results are flooding in when it matters as Ferrari seeks to end the drought.

The signs so far look good for Ferrari, but with 20 races still to go it's very early days yet

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images