Who slept worst last night: Leclerc & Sainz

Dear readers,

Dreams are strange sometimes. About mine today: I’m in the middle of an outing with the seniors I cared for during my time as a civil servant, and for sandwiches, the exquisite bacon and finest sausages are served by freshly baked specialty restaurateur Gerhard Berger.

My dear friend Fritz (Haven’t you seen how it goes for years?) Bites into the bread and praises the fact that Berger understands much more about bacon than he does about the shipping company his father founded.

Royal Tyrolean Bacon and Sausage: Perhaps an alternative, should the importance of the DTM stop being rescued?

But I can assure our readers that this should no longer be the topic of our column today!

Future at Ferrari? This is not a comforting thought!

I slept poorly due to strange dreams, not just me, but also presumably two gentlemen whose vision of the future may, at best, be troubled right now: Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz.

Let’s start with Leclerc. He has a contract until 2024, and at the time it was announced, it seemed like a good idea too. He had won two races in his first year and was on the podium seven more times, and Ferrari had the most powerful engine in Grand Prix races, which Toto Wolff claims led to exhaustion of engineers at Mercedes.

The situation has now changed. More precisely on February 28, the last day of the winter tests in Barcelona. Then the FIA ​​and Ferrari announced their intransparent and controversial deal, the consequences of which could be impressively seen at Spa.

At a track where the proud Scuderia had finished every session in first and second a year earlier and Leclerc celebrated his first Formula 1 victory, a year later you had to be happy not to lose both cars in Q1. and in the end finish 13 and 14.

The fact that the Ferraris escaped the maximum lap penalty was mainly due to the fact that a race lap at Spa lasts approximately 1:50 minutes and the safety car pushed the field alongside it. But five Ferrari engines in the last six places (if Alfa driver Antonio Giovinazzi failed), that says everything about how weak the Ferrari engine has become in 2020.

Engine deficit – will not improve quickly

The reason for this is now secondary. The problem is different: the engines are homologated and can only be further developed for greater reliability.

It is true that a state that can be overcome. A manufacturer only has to run the engine in a higher power mode, and reliability issues will arise that can be reported to the FIA ​​and then rectified. By the way, one of the reasons why the FIA ​​wants to ban the famous “party mode”.

This means that Ferrari will have a very bad time to make up for the power deficit, which according to our research is more than 40hp in the coming years. A completely new engine won’t be available until 2026 at the earliest. And even chassis development is largely frozen until 2022.

Anyone who thinks Ferrari will have a world title shot in 2021 is at least as strange a dreamer as I am.

The fact that things improve rapidly in the following years is not a surefire success either. The budget cap will prevent senior teams in crisis from simply pouring money into the system until their cart is up and running again.

Turnaround 2022: not impossible, but very difficult

Achieving the change of course by 2022 is not impossible. But extremely difficult. And perhaps the former head of the Formula 1 team is also right, who believes that Ferrari will not win a World Cup for the next ten years.

So the prospects are bleak for Leclerc (22) and Sainz (26), who are linking perhaps the best and most important years of their careers to a project that does not offer particularly interesting prospects today. In light of his decision to leave McLaren and switch to Ferrari, Sainz in particular has to wonder whether he correctly anticipated trends in Formula 1.

Without a doubt: if I were a racing driver, I would not miss the opportunity to drive Formula 1 for Ferrari once in my life. Ferrari is Ferrari. And you can’t choose when the call from Maranello comes. However, dare I say: at McLaren, Sainz’s chances of becoming world champion in the next few years would not be great either, but they would be greater than at Ferrari.

It is clear that the Ferrari crisis (Mattia Binotto prefers to call it a “storm”) is far from over. The good Lord has mercy on the Scuderia and this year Monza takes place without an audience. Imagine the high-pitched whistling concert of the Tifosi when Leclerc and Vettel are eliminated on the road to power in Q1!

Just so there are no misunderstandings: the residue Ferrari broke up at Spa cannot simply come from the engine. The chassis is just as bad. If the excellent quality of the two drivers is deducted from the bill, Ferrari was even slower than its own customers Alfa Romeo and Haas. And that can only be due to the chassis, not the drivetrain.

The engine can’t be the only problem

The fact that Ferrari got so wrong in development must stem from a correlation problem between the simulation and the race track. The pandemic certainly didn’t help, an issue Red Bull can sing a song about, too. But blaming everything on Corona cannot be the answer. And nobody tries it in Maranello either.

Toto Wolff made it known in Spa that Ferrari is incorrectly setting its priorities if the appeal against the “Copygate” ruling is not withdrawn. One should better focus on sporting achievements, so the Mercedes team boss accordingly.

Statements that are currently leaving deep wounds on Ferrari fans around the world. But it’s always been like this in Formula 1: if you have the damage, you don’t have to worry about the taunts.

And the thing also has a winner: Sebastian Vettel. The four-time world champion will have no cheers after finishing 13th. But at least Ferrari’s quick goodbye hurts a little less when you know it can hardly get any worse in sporting terms.

Y: In Spa you crossed the finish line before Leclerc. A fact that we must not ignore.

you

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