Talk Steer: Tony Dodgins on...

When Max Mosley pushed through the F1 engine freeze at the end of 2006 he believed performance to be at similar levels. Today it appears less so.

Within the constraints of the freeze you'd expect less talk about horsepower differentials, but more than once, especially from Renault personnel, there have been rumblings about how far its spirit has been respected.

Based on monitoring carried out at Hockenheim, one team points to the Ferrari engine being strongest, with Mercedes close and Renault potentially as much as 30bhp down.

Maximum speed figures from Valencia last weekend seemed to bear that out. At the first intermediate point in qualifying the Ferraris and Ferrari-engined Toro Rossos were fastest - Raikkonen (287.7km/h), Bourdais (287.1), Massa (287.0) and Vettel (285.0). Alonso (282.0) was the fastest Renault and the Renault-powered Red Bulls of Webber (281.1) and Coulthard (280.9) were 18th and 19th. Race speed trap figures again had the Ferraris and Toro Rossos fastest, with Adrian Sutil's Ferrari-engined Force India fifth. How can there be any suspicion or unrest within the context of a freeze? Hasn't Ferrari simply done the best job? While people aren't exactly jumping up and down, there is concern about the flatness of the playing field.

You can make changes to your engine provided they are in the interests of reliability or cost-saving. You make a request to the FIA and if the governing body does not agree, you are simply told "no". But if the FIA agrees, the request is circulated to the other teams so that everyone knows what everyone else is doing and can object.

"We all know well enough if a modification is about performance or reliability," says BMW's Mario Theissen.

Similar but different

But some say there's an anomaly. The FIA took an engine at Suzuka at the end of 2006 and the teams had until December to define modifications. Then, in March 2007, another engine was taken by the FIA. During the '07 season the FIA compared engines with the one they got in March and if the two were equal they were happy.

But, claim some engine men, they never controlled whether the engine they got in March was the right evolution of the one from Suzuka '06. "I understand they are very busy but that check never being done could have offset the starting point," says one. "And they can't check it now because Ferrari already has the '07 championship trophy in its cabinet."

The irony for Red Bull is that at the end of '06 Adrian Newey was pushing for a Renault instead of a Ferrari, believing it to have better heat rejection.

"That Renault engine won the championship," says Toyota's Luca Marmorini, "but that doesn't mean it was the best engine on its own. Maybe Red Bull discovered something they could have discovered before. Maybe the performance of the Ferrari engine was already better. It's difficult to judge."

Theissen asks: "Is it sure the engines were similar originally or was Adrian just wrong? But for sure if Renault didn't do anything [over the winter of 2006-07], if they didn't make progress - and it's true that in the first year you could do more than you can do now - if they missed that opportunity they cannot recover from it."

It's quality, not quantity

Theissen doesn't believe there's 30bhp difference between any of the F1 engines. "I'd expect all of them to be within 20bhp or less," he says. He's also candid about the power gains Munich has made over the past 18 months. "From the engine itself definitely below 10bhp, including ancillaries but not including intake and exhaust. There is not much more we can do."

More emphasis is now placed on closer monitoring of materials, no doubt something uppermost in the minds at Maranello this week after successive failures for Massa and Raikkonen in Hungary and Valencia. "We are using engines much more at the limit now than we were two years ago," Marmorini explains.

If Theissen is right about Renault being unable to recover lost ground you have to spare a thought for Sebastien Vettel, one of the stars in Valencia. Toro Rosso could well be strong again at Spa and, particularly, Monza. He might then be wondering about his 'promotion' to the Red Bull senior team. From the fast car with the slower team-mate to the slow car with the faster one.