Was the miracle just a mirage? In the space of a few Grands Prix, the Scuderia went from Hallelujah to Berezina. Forgotten are the two successes in the first three races of the season for Charles Leclerc, and this rapid rise to the top of the world championship. The Monegasque driver remains on a retirement in Spain, a disappointing 4th place in Monaco after a strategic error by his team and another breakage in Azerbaijan, Sunday June 12.
Unfortunate for the Italian team especially since, at the same time, Red Bull has garnered voraciously … Before the start of the Canadian Grand Prix, Sunday June 19, Cyril Abiteboul, former director of Renault F1, takes stock with Franceinfo: sport on the sudden failure of the Reds.
It seems antediluvian when Leclerc was 46 points ahead of Max Verstappen after the Australian Grand Prix. After Baku’s low blow, he is now 13 points behind Sergio Perez and 34 behind the Dutch leader. If the wheel turns very quickly in F1, the hope of a new world title, which has been fleeing Maranello since 2007 and the coronation of Kimi Räikkönen, has nevertheless taken a hit in the wing. “It hurts, words fail“, breathed a disappointed Charles Leclerc just after his abandonment in Azerbaijan.
It hurts again. But I’ll never give up. pic.twitter.com/JvTjR09Lm9
— Charles Leclerc (@Charles_Leclerc) June 12, 2022
The disappointment, very real, lives up to the hopes raised by this start to the season with a bang. “There is disillusion because there was a very big performance before“, thus nuance Cyril Abiteboul. “We must not forget that Ferrari has come a long way. And it’s a feat to have had a decent season last year while preparing as well as possible for 2022 where they are completely back in the game.“. The former boss of Renault does not hide his admiration for the prancing horse firm: “Knowing that in addition they equip two other teams, Haas and Toro Rosso, this testifies to their immense strike force“.
Mattia Binotto, the boss of Ferrari, also tried to put these recent failures into perspective. “We did not get on fire at the start of the season, we are not going to dramatize today“, he tempers in the columns of Nextgen Auto. Even if he is forced to concede that his red single-seaters have faults in the armor: “We pushed hard to develop the car over the winter, but we proved that we are not completely reliable yet. There is still work to do“.
How did we then go from the highway to the title to the Stations of the Cross? The problem seems identified and is located under the hood. The Ferrari engine is high performance but it breaks too often. Impossible, under these conditions, to fight with the metronomic Red Bull. For Cyril Abiteboul, it is the fruit of a “accelerated validation process“. He explains: “Ferrari fought so hard to get back to the top level that they didn’t have the material time to ensure the absolute reliability of all the parts. What worked perfectly at the start of the season is now starting to crack under the weight of the kilometers covered…“
Like all high-precision mechanics, the Ferrari engine is a jewel, but a fragile jewel. “It’s the best on the board, adds Cyril Abiteboul, but there the team is hitting hard“Especially since the new regulations, which only allocate three engine blocks to the teams during the season, will inevitably strike at one time or another Leclerc, who has already reached this quota…
The Monegasque can already anticipate a penalty of ten places on one of the next starting grids. “With the tightening of the general level and therefore the increased difficulty of recovering from a bad position when the lights go out, this could weigh heavily in the points tally at the end of the season.“, predicts the former French director.
It’s very difficult to improve a car that lasts but does not move forward
Cyril Abiteboulfrance info: sports
What is most infuriating, perhaps, for the transalpine team, is to continue to dominate the qualifications without being able to translate this superiority into the race. Charles Leclerc thus remains on four pole positions in a row without victory at the finish. Would Ferrari have built a car for testing when Red Bull made one for racing?
Cyril Abiteboul, however, wants to be optimistic for the Maranello firm: “With the rule of homologated engines [c’est à dire figés dans leur évolution jusqu’en 2025], it is better to work on a performance basis that we can try to make more reliable rather than the reverse. It’s very difficult to improve a car that lasts but does not move forward”. In the country where motorsport is a religion, mass has not yet been said.