With the homologation of the latest evolution of the hybrid system of the power unit 066/7, Ferrari has definitively frozen the engine that the Scuderia will use until the end of the 2025 championship: for three years the engine designed by Wolf Zimmermann will remain the same if not for the interventions that the FIA will grant to improve reliability.
The same is obviously true for the other manufacturers (Mercedes, Renault and Red Bull-Honda). The Cavallino unit used at Monza in the Italian GP at the sound level tests was credited with 1,024 horsepower, a reference power value in line with Honda and Mercedes and with the French not far away, but still behind.
Carlos Sainz, Ferrari F1-75
Photo by: Alessio Morgese
The FIA had foreseen a confluence of the power values before the “freezing”, in order to reset the research on the power unit in the parts that are blocked, in order to block costs and also direct the world of engineers towards the budget cap that will enter in force from next year.
The financial regulation for 2023 will impose a spending limit set at 95 million dollars a year until 2025, while with the debut of the new PU in 2026 the threshold will be raised to 130 million dollars.
The staff directed by Enrico Gualtieri, therefore, is redundant with respect to the needs that the Sports Management will have to face in the next three years: it will no longer be necessary to produce one hundred engines per season, occupying the test benches for endurance tests or allocating cells to the engines. experimental in search of performance.
In short, in the next three years, the power unit will lose its strategic value and the search for performance will be more entrusted to the chassis and aerodynamics, even if there will be attempts to take the exploitation of the engine to the limit of reliability, trying to improve the efficiency of the single-seater also passing through a reduction of the radiant masses which can be valid both in weight saving and in lower resistance to advancement.
Mattia Binotto with the Ferrari team in Monza
Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images
But it is inevitable that the Manufacturers dealing with F1 power units will have to significantly reduce their workforce to align with the new needs of a smarter world. Ferrari took note of this and during the week Mattia Binotto talked about it with all the parties involved to build a plan in which to study how to relocate the inevitable redundancies.
It is true that the design area has already been oriented towards the power unit of 2026, but the endothermic unit that will have to replace the current one will have so many regulatory constraints (size, common parts and choices towards more primordial and less extreme solutions ), while the electrical part that will have to guarantee the recovery of 50% of the power (the usual thousand horses required) will be born with less freedom, to facilitate the approach of new brands such as Audi and Porsche (but not only).
Mercedes, for example, is not replenishing the workforce after the massive exits of engineers to Red Bull Powertrains, but is selecting figures only in strategic roles. It seems that Audi, which is preparing for entry into F1, has also begun to draw on the specialists of Brixworth, also looking at Maranello.
F1 has entered a phase of great transformation where the key word is efficiency: in the diversification of activities that make it possible not to lose high-cost training skills, the Star has launched a plan for research on ecological aircraft fuels, while it would have started a cell of work on the exploitation of e-fuel, relying, it seems, on a financing promoted to 50% by the European Commission.
The world of engines is a world in great evolution: the e-fuel with zero fossils that F1 will adopt from 2026 is a strategic tool that could extend the life of internal combustion engines well beyond 2035, a term obtusely placed by politics.
Synthetic gasoline exists, it could have a sustainable cost, but at the moment nobody produces it in the quantities necessary to satisfy a market. The main problem to be solved is that and, in spite of Aramco, which has a “vision” of the future, oil companies prefer to extract crude oil to produce electricity, rather than converting to green hydrogen.
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