It's become critical for teams like Ferrari to prepare what upgrades they'll pursue, agreeing with each department on what's feasible.
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The financial cap, according to Ferrari racing director Laurent Mekies, has put a halt to season-long enhancements. When Formula 1 returns to action in 2022, all-new challengers will take to the track, with the new set of regulations, while restricted, yet allowing teams to experiment and develop their challengers during the season. Ferrari, on the other hand, expects the budget cap to play a significant role in this regard. For the first time in 2021, teams were restricted in how much they could spend on their chassis, with the original amount of $145 million being decreased to $140 million for the 2022 season.
Both amounts indicated a considerable reduction in spending compared to previous years, and Mekies anticipates the development programme for 2022 to be harmed as a result of the team’s concentration on staying under the limit. Although Ferrari’s upgrade strategy will not be as limited as it was in 2021, when they focused almost entirely on the 2022 challenger, Mekies does not believe Ferrari will be able to deliver upgrades in the same volume as in past years now that the budget limitation is in place.
“If you look at 2019 or 2018, I think we will see less. In those seasons, the big teams had something new every race, or every two,” said Mekies, quoted by Motorsport.com. “It seems difficult from our point of view to have a large number of updates with the limits that exist.”
As a result, it’s become critical for teams like Ferrari to carefully prepare what upgrades they’ll pursue, agreeing with each department on what’s feasible given budget constraints. However, because these restrictions are brand new for 2022, the upgrading plan could be substantially altered if a severe issue arises during pre-season testing or the opening rounds that requires immediate attention.
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“You need to keep a few marks to develop during the season because you will learn more and more, and you have to find ways to adjust it,” said Mekies. “That’s been the biggest challenge. Once you’ve defined it that’s what you have to develop, the aerodynamics and the mechanics, so every department will say ‘okay, with that I can do these two or three updates’ and then you will schedule all your plans to make it happen.”
“That’s what we do now. The difficulty is it depends on how competitive you are with the others. If you have a big hiccup at the start of the season and it doesn’t correlate with the rest, you can spend some of your money on two or three upgrades. You need to fix it any way you can, so you take the parts, throw it away and that’s how you will fix it,” he added.
