Ferrari says it plans to complete the season with its current stock of turbochargers and avoid grid penalties for either of its drivers.
Sebastian Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen have both used all four of their allocated turbochargers for the season. Using a fifth will mean having to take a ten-place grid penalty.
Ferrari’s chief technical officer Mattia Binotto explained how the team plans to see the season out without using any more turbos.
“Certainly it is somehow a concern in the fact that we had failures on the turbo at the start of the season and we have to replace them at the very start and you introduce turbo number three, turbo number four,” he said in today’s FIA press conference.
“But having said that we introduced as well on the following turbos some modifications for reliability. They are running well at the moment.”
“So we’ve got all the pool at the moment which have been introduced. We’ve got all the mileage available on these turbos. So are rotating them and obviously it’s our objective to complete the season with the current pool of turbos.”
Binotto also played down suggestions that recent FIA rules clarifications regarding car floors and oil burning had been aimed at his team. He said the team’s fluctuating competitiveness was circuit-specific.
“Each race is different to the others,” said Binotto. “There have been races at the start of the season where we have been competitive and others where Mercedes has been competitive.”
“For example Bahrain very early in the season they were very competitive in qualifying. So I don’t think there is a clear tendency and there is actually trend on the competitiveness between the two teams.”
“Certainly the development is very important. That has to be done race-by-race. There are still many races to go, we are just halfway through the season. I don’t think there is any reasons why there should be a trend or another other.”
“I think that oil burning is something that is not directly related to Ferrari. And the floor I don’t think there is any impact on our performance.”
Nigel
28th July 2017, 16:25
Guess they won’t be introducing any further turbo updates, then.
Stephen Crowsen (@drycrust)
28th July 2017, 19:41
Yes, and they seem to have a lot of confidence in their reliability.
VissileF1 (@mark-visser99)
29th July 2017, 2:18
I don’t know how much restrictions there are on what they can do with components, but they’re probably inspecting them after every race and wear rates are low enough that they believe they’ll last to the end of the season.
Sensord4notbeingafanboi (@peartree)
29th July 2017, 3:07
Yup, seems like it. The Ferrari looks like the same car from the beginning of the season. Yes there have been many updates but the car though it looks quick still looks a bit vague, on the other hand the Mercedes looks to have become much more driveable not the “diva” it once was called and the RB ought to relentlessly improve, by far this has been their better showing, they seem to have fix their rear end stablity.
sprint9 (@sprint9)
29th July 2017, 0:03
Is there any room in the rules that allows rebuilding or repairing a unit or are they sealed and once its done its over for the component.
MaddMe (@)
29th July 2017, 1:19
I was wondering on that one too…
My suspicion is that it would not be allowed though..
drmouse (@drmouse)
29th July 2017, 9:44
Iirc they are sealed by the FIA, and breaking the seal would make them count as new units.
I’m basing this on the gearbox roles, so I may be wrong. Ferrari gave one of their drivers a 5 place penalty on purpose a few years back by breaking the seal on the gearbox to promote their lead driver one place.