Why the jury's still out on Ferrari's updates - and may be for some time

The most salient facts about Ferrari's season so far make for sobering reading - at least, if you're a Maranello employee. After three races, Ferrari currently sits fifth in the constructors' standings, with 27 points to its name and a quarter of Mercedes' current haul.

Despite Charles Leclerc scoring a surprise second place in the season-opening Austrian Grand Prix, Ferrari decided to fast-track its planned Hungarian GP update package in time for the Styrian Grand Prix - but thanks to Leclerc's over-eagerness into Turn 3 on the opening lap, neither he nor Sebastian Vettel could gather a race's worth of data on them.

One weekend on, and Ferrari explained that the Hungary weekend was going to be spent exploring the Styria package and little else. Cue an exclamation of "is that it, then?" from anyone with an interest in the technological side of F1 - but from Ferrari's perspective, it made sense to hold back on any new parts.

After all, the only real data available on the new front wing and floor were from Friday's free practice sessions at the second Austria round. Trying to lump more upgrades on top of those, having not explored their potential properly, would throw Ferrari a school of red herrings that it cannot afford to fish up.

Having already sent mixed messages about the validity of those new upgrades - Vettel had praised them after last weekend's Friday practice, before rolling back to declare that they weren't "a game-changer" on Thursday - it seemed Ferrari didn't quite know where it stood.

The Hungaroring circuit is also a good place to look at those updates in isolation too, given it's not particularly engine-specific. Given the beleaguered SF1000's shortfall in the power stakes - which, dear reader, we'll come to in a minute - the restrictive nature of the Hungary circuit could slightly mask that too.

Leclerc even spoke positively of the new updates post-practice, presumably sufficiently buoyant enough that he wouldn't have to stuff his car into the back of Vettel's come race-day.

With qualifying much-improved, and Ferrari capitalising on Red Bull's disjointed efforts to monopolise the third row, it looked as though the updates had given both Leclerc and Vettel more confidence.

"I think it is much better than the previous weekend," Vettel explained. "For the first time we have both cars in Q3.

"I think we know that Austria didn't really suit us and we lost a lot of time in the straights, and here I think there are a lot more corners to make up for it. The car felt better balanced as well, so I think we are much closer compared to the people around us, let's say Racing Point, Red Bull and even McLaren. That is positive."

It's hard to get a bead on Ferrari's pure performance at Hungary given the 2020 edition of the grand prix was so tyre-influenced. But what's clear is that Ferrari was, at best, the fourth-fastest team overall in the race once Red Bull got over its qualifying wobble.

Clearly, the circuit suited the McLaren MCL35 far less than Austria had, and Carlos Sainz Jr could only manage a 10th-place finish (ninth after Magnussen's penalty) after both he and Lando Norris had been entrenched within the midfield, but the Ferrari doesn't quite inspire the same confidence in the drivers that the McLaren does.

"To be honest there was something wrong in the race. It just doesn't match with the car in qualifying, but also the day before on Friday" Charles Leclerc

Although there were tyre compound differences throughout the race that make one-on-one comparisons hard, Sainz looked the more self-assured driver during his lengthy scrap with Leclerc, eventually breaching the Monegasque's defence of the final points-paying position to keep McLaren's run going.

Vettel, meanwhile, spent most of his race about a sector behind Lance Stroll and succumbed to Alex Albon's Red Bull with a mistake at Turn 2, although somehow kept sixth away from Sergio Perez's grasp. While the result was about as good as Vettel could have hoped for - having being held for what seemed like an age after his first pitstop - it still wasn't a convincing performance.

Leclerc, having managed to make it to the end with only 11th to show for it after a failed gamble on the soft tyre in the expectation of rain left him with a mammoth 50-lap stint on the hard, hinted at a sudden loss of pace between Saturday and Sunday.

"To be honest there was something wrong in the race", he said afterwards, clearly having not exhausted his lamentations over the team radio.

"It just doesn't match with the car in qualifying, but also the day before on Friday. We will be looking at the data to see what went wrong; the car was really hard to drive on my side."

Now with a full race to fall back on, did Ferrari's upgrades work? Unfortunately, it appears as though the jury's still very much out on that one - especially as there's a bigger issue at play.

During the Hungary weekend, Ferrari principal Mattia Binotto finally admitted that the troubled 2020 power unit just might have been pegged back a little bit by the glut of FIA technical directives that swarmed the teams' inboxes at the end of 2019.

Although it didn't receive any formal punishment in last year's controversial PU 'arrangement' with the FIA - as the governing body couldn't determine conclusively if it was illegal - turning up for the new season with a powerplant that was considerably less able to peel the skin off of a rice pudding suggested there was seemingly more than a little correlation between the two events.

"There are areas of the regulations where maybe clarifications are still required," Binotto reflected - or perhaps, deflected. "It's an ongoing process which has always existed in the past, and will exist in the future.

"Since last year a lot of technical directives have been released, eventually clarifying some of the areas of the regulations. I think that through those TDs we had to adapt ourselves."

The technical directive in question came after Red Bull sought clarification on the use of fuel-flow meters. Every F1 car since 2014, the year from which teams would be allowed to pump no more than 100kg of fuel per hour into the engine, has been fitted with an FIA-approved fuel flow device.

The device measures fuel flow every 0.4ms to check that it doesn't exceed the allotted 100kg/h rate mandated by the rules. Pumping a higher rate of fuel in around those intervals means that more fuel enters the engine, and therefore provides a not-insignificant power boost.

Qualifying, in particular, is when Ferrari could make the most of that as the drivers wouldn't have to save fuel, but the 110kg allowance in race trim means that the effect is weakened. That, partially, seemed to be the reason why Ferrari was so good on Saturdays in 2019.

The FIA has now, to nip any further fuel-flow transgressions, added a second sensor that only it has the data for. Teams won't be able to second-guess the measurement intervals of that sensor, meaning that they'll have to stick to the letter of the law.

"We were doing developments as well for this season we will not be able to introduce during this season itself. We had the long shutdown period before the start of the season, which has not been the case for all the power unit manufacturers" Mattia Binotto

Engine development is largely locked in for 2020 due to the homologation of power units, meaning that Ferrari will probably have to wait until the off-season to add any potency to its neutered powerplant.

"We were doing developments as well for this season we will not be able to introduce during this season itself," Binotto explained, "because we had the long shutdown period before the start of the season, which has not been the case for all the power unit manufacturers. We'll try to develop as much as we can by the start of next season.

"That's one point. The other side as I said, there are still areas of the regulations that need to be clarified, and hopefully that may be done in order that in the future at least there is sufficient clarity in the regulations to make sure that we've got all the same understanding."

Binotto suggested later on that other manufacturers were hit by that directive.

"I don't think it was only the case of Ferrari, I think looking at the power output of this season I think most of the other manufacturers had to adapt themselves," he said.

"Certainly as Ferrari we had to adapt, and as a simple output of that we lost some of the performance we had. I think that now we've got a clearer situation in some areas of the regulations, hopefully that will continue if required for the future."

In a particularly spicy sub-plot of 2020, it appears that Binotto seems to have got on Mercedes boss Toto Wolff's goat of late. The accusation that other F1 engine suppliers had to water down their engines didn't wash, and suggested that Ferrari wouldn't have had problems had it stuck to the FIA script in the first place.

"Another complete bullshit story, technical directives," Wolff scoffed. "There's a clear regulation on power units. There have been clarifications in Austin, what is allowed to do or not, which were important, but nothing that was in any way surprising because if you comply to the regulations that was anyway clear."

For 2020, Ferrari is stuck having to make changes to its chassis while lumbered with an ineffectual power unit. Binotto estimated that it was losing 0.7s on the straights at the Red Bull Ring, and the laptime data of Haas and Alfa Romeo also suggests that the engine has tied the customer teams to the back of the field.

With little to no wiggle-room for Ferrari to make the changes that the power unit needs, one may be afforded to make the prediction that its homecoming race at Monza is going to be incredibly difficult for the Scuderia. Perhaps it's for the best that F1's currently racing under closed doors, lest the tifosi become restless during the Italy double-header.