Mattia Binotto has indicated for the first time about Ferrari being hurt by the FIA Technical Directive as he says all of the F1 engine manufacturers’ have had to adapt to it.
The engine side has been a hot bed of controversy since the 2019 F1 season when teams lobbied the FIA to issue technical directives which forced changes for Ferrari, who were unbelievable fast on straightline, something which irked rivals.
While it is not known what the changes were asked to be made due to the deal between Ferrari and FIA but there is clear loss of time on the straights for the Italian outfit. They say that the quest to be quicker in the corners has resulted in loss of straightline speed.
The likes of Mercedes and Red Bull Racing still want answers from the FIA which Ferrari doesn’t want to be made public due to intellectual property scenario. But for the first time in Hungary, Binotto hinted on the team being hurt by the technical notes.
While not being too direct, Binotto stated that all of the manufacturers’ have lower output as they are adapting to these changes, which is still not 100 percent clear as they need more clarifications. “I think that regulation is very difficult and complex,” he started.
“I think there are areas of the regulation of the power unit where maybe clarifications are still required. It’s an ongoing process which has always existed in the past and will exist in the future. Since last year a lot of TDs have been released.
“Eventually clarifying some of the areas in the regulations. I think that through those TDs we had to adapt ourselves. I don’t think it’s only the case of Ferrari, because looking at the power output of this season, many others, most of the manufacturers somehow had to adapt themselves.
“But 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 obviously now we have more clearer situation of some areas of the regulation. Hopefully that will continue, if required for the future.”
Adding more on the Ferrari engine, Binotto admitted that the shutdown has hurt their development process and they have had to rethink some of what they want to undertake. “Engine or power unit development is an ongoing process that we never stopped since 2012 when we started developing those engines,” he said.
“Now it’s a long time we were developing them. We were doing developments as well for this season that we will not be able to introduce during itself because we had a long shutdown period before the start of the season, which has not been the case for other power unit manufacturers by the way.
“We will still develop and we try to – somehow – develop as much as we can by the start of next season. That’s one point. On the other side, as I said, I think there are still areas of the regulations that need to be clarified and hopefully that may be done in order than in the future at least there are sufficient clarity on the regulation to ensure we’ve got all the same understanding,” summed up Binotto.
Meanwhile, on the car front, from Austria to Hungary, Ferrari hasn’t got huge amount of upgrades, especially after both the cars crashed out early in Styrian GP. Binotto stated that this is an ongoing process to understand the changes and if they are working or not.
“Obviously after FP1 it’s always very difficult to judge: you’re focussed on your own programme,” said Binotto. “We’re running here the parts we brought already in Austria last week. We obviously had wet sessions, had a very bad race, very short, so really we didn’t have an answer from them.
“The programme here for us was really to understand the car, and then try to find the balance for the rest of the weekend. We’ve got again a lot of data to analyse. I don’t think we’ve got yet an output but the two drivers certainly are focused on the weekend. We know that quali will be important here.
“Grid position is key in Hungary, so we need to prepare well for the quali. Likely that we’ve got a wet session this afternoon so this morning session was important really to collect data and try to somehow understand the car, the balance in order to be ready tomorrow.”
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