New Ferrari team principal Frederic Vasseur says that the teams rumoured 30hp increase is a “joke”
The Frenchman, who was previously team principal and CEO at Alfa Romeo Sauber, replaced Mattia Binotto earlier this month after a year of disappointment for the prancing horse.
Despite the team establishing themselves as a frontrunner again in 2022, the squad’s championship challenge fell away with strategy errors, poor reliability, and being out-developed by their main rivals Red Bull.
Ferrari horsepower talk
Over the winter, there has been talk of a 30hp increase coming out of Maranello, even though an engine freeze is in place until the end of 2025.
The rules allow for reliability changes, if they are approved by the FIA technical department which must be satisfied that the changes are solely for ‘reliability, safety or cost saving.’
There’s always suspicion around teams finding gains in performance during an engine freeze. Alpine executive director Bruno Famine recently told The Race “Behind every reliability issue you often have potential for performance gain.
“The limit is not exactly always super clear.”
But, Vasseur said in his first media session since becoming Ferrari team principal, that all the power unit development during the off season has gone into improving reliability and branded talk of a 30hp increase, “a joke.”
However, Ferrari should be better off than at the end of last year, as running the MGU-H less aggressively after Baku, due to reliability concerns, was said to be costing them around 0.2s per lap.
Ferrari could run the power unit more aggressively
If this is the case, and Ferrari have managed to fix their issues, then they should be able to run the MGU-H at the same levels they did pre-Baku 22, when it clearly had the best power delivery in the lower gears compared with the other manufacturers.
Whether this is the 30hp increase that the team are rumoured to have for 2023 is unknown. Running the MGU-H less aggressively may not necessarily cost you 30hp, but it could cost 0.2s per lap, given the fact that the electrical deployment is less effective.
Ferrari said before the 2022 season, that they would make aggressive steps in performance and deal with the issues of reliability in the future.
Therefore, despite the freeze, an increase in performance is theoretically possible for the 2023 power unit, back to levels we saw before Leclerc’s Baku failure meant turning down the potential of the MGU-H for the remainder of the season.