Reliability issues were one of the main issues faced in 2022 by the Scuderia di Maranello and their respective Ferrari-powered teams, namely Haas and Alfa Romeo. The engines of the Cavallino present the second highest rate of average replacements for each car, around 3.7 changes per car per season, behind only Alpine’s 4. From the beginning of the year Mattia Binotto had planned to manage the season by breaking the ceiling of the three units allowed by the regulation, but the subsequent breakdowns and reliability problems that emerged from Barcelona onwards forced to revise the initial plans. The first part of the championship ended with four engines used by Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz respectively, with other replacements still in the pipeline.
Above all, the retreats of Carlos Sainz in Austria and Charles Leclerc in Baku stand out, the latter failure whose analyzes revealed to be closely connected to that previously experienced in Barcelona. In Spain, the Monegasque was forced to retire due to a sudden overheating, not monitored in advance by the telemetry, a dynamic that suggests a sudden break. According to what has been learned from FormulaPassion.it, the investigations conducted in Maranello seem to converge towards the turbocharger shaft as a source of some of the withdrawals suffered during the season by the Rosse del Cavallino. The conditional is a must, considered as when opening a damaged engine the scattered pieces and metal fragments make it difficult to identify the actual origin of the evils.
In turbocharged power units, the exhaust gases act on the turbine, carrying out work that is transmitted through a rotating shaft to the compressor and the MGU-H electric motor. The Maranello engines would suffer precisely from the excessive deformations of this shaft, deviating the various elements with respect to the predetermined rotation axis with fatal consequences for the engine. The length of the offending shaft is accentuated by the length of the spindle: the power unit 2022 from Maranello does not have a compact system with compressor, turbine and MGU-H close together, but rather spaced apart. There are still some shadows on the actual architecture of the Cavallino engine, but according to what it has collected it would have some differences compared to the well-known split turbo of Mercedes, Honda and Alpine. In any case, not all the failures in the Ferrari season are attributable to the turbocharger: the retirement of Carlos Sainz in Baku, for example, is the result of a hydraulic problem, a common bore from which not even the competition is exempt.
In Sports Management we work to tackle the problem, taking advantage of the opportunities for intervention for reasons of reliability granted by the regulation. The implementation of the changes and the waiting for the supply of new metal alloys, however, makes it difficult to think of a complete resolution before 2023. Meanwhile, the team monitors the current units to manage the problem, as stated by Mattia Binotto in the post-France: “There have been reliability problems and we are never sheltered, so saying that they have returned is not the expression I would use. I think we understand the problem and therefore are handling it. We have not yet resolved it definitively, but that does not mean that we have to remain in suspense. Managing it means facing the race with the confidence of being able to finish it ”. The Cavallino Team Principal therefore reinforced the concept in the after-race in Budapest: “We are working on reliability and managing it, also because it will have to be resolved definitively for next season. Some changes cannot be implemented in a few weeks. However, this does not mean that it will not be managed this season ”.
Among the options potentially on the table to manage the problem is limiting the achievement of combined torques at critical rotation speeds for the turbo shaft, but on several occasions Binotto has denied how the Maranello engines have been weakened to preserve the reliability. Another tool available is the containment of the mileage accumulated by each unit, by taking into account two more car substitutions by the end of the championship, the first of which could already be operated in Belgium. Spa in fact offers several opportunities for overtaking and comeback, would allow, if desired, not to postpone further the introduction of the updated hybrid and would avoid serving a penalty in the home race in Monza. On tracks less sensitive to engine power such as Zandvoort and Singapore, the units that already raced in July could instead be reused, in order to then evaluate the most favorable opportunity to perform the last replacement in one of the final stages.
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