Ferrari “really close” to Mercedes’ engine performance

2015 Austrian Grand Prix

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Ferrari’s power unit director Mattia Binotto believes the team’s performance deficit to Mercedes is smaller than it has ever been since it introduced its revised engine in Canada.

Speaking in today’s FIA press conference Binotto said Ferrari had been able to bring more performance to their power unit while Mercedes was focusing on reliability gains.

“We know exactly what we’ve done on our side, we cannot know what Mercedes have done so far,” he said.

“It’s true we’ve spent [engine development] tokens, tokens you spend on the performance, so what we did was clearly an upgrade in performance in Canada.

“When Mercedes has not spent any tokens yet, they have simply tried to fix some reliability problems. So whatever they modified in the second unit they introduced in Canada was for the only purpose of reliability.”

Binotto said the team has verified that the upgrade introduced in Canada has brought the expected gains, and that Global Positioning System data shows they are almost on terms with Mercedes.

“What you can do is try to compare GPS data of different cars try to understand different profile of acceleration, try to extract from it eventually what could be the difference or the gap in overall power unit performance,” he explained.

“It’s clear that compared to what was the situation of last year now the difference has been reduced by a lot. Obviously what you are doing when you are doing such an exercise, you are doing it on a statistical base, difficult to have an accurate value on a single lap on a single comparison.”

“But we believe that currently the situation is really close. And eventually race-by-race you can have some results which go in that direction or the other. But after Canada we believe that maybe Mercedes is still in front but by a quantity which becomes fairly reduced at the moment.”

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    Keith Collantine
    Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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    18 comments on “Ferrari “really close” to Mercedes’ engine performance”

    1. I hope their GPS is not faulty as their wind tunnel in the last few years. Can’t really afford to go wrong in this scenario.

      Hopefully the next package will be ready at Monza, a super engine supposedly :)

      1. Their wind tunnel is fully operational since the beginning of last year. They had a lot of problems before, until they decided to build a new one and destroy the old by the end of 2012 if I remember it correctly. The new one was finished by the end of 2013 and started since 2014.

      2. Yeah. They are gonna give a boosted albeit unreliable and undriveable engine to Vettel and expect him to win the race. That’s my guess.

        1. Poor guy. That’s one hot seat.

    2. What I’m reading is: “Our chassis is really bad.”

      1. You’re really wrong! If Ferrari has a bad chassis, then what can be said about Sauber or Manor?!?

        1. Alternatively: “Our chassis is not as good as Mercedes.” If you prefer it that way.

          1. yes, that one fits it a lot better @neina

      2. Sauber is thereabouts where Force India are, and Manor still have no money to develop anything.

    3. I actually believe that Mercedes are not running with full engine power. More like 90% (excluding the Q3/overtaking setting, increase fuel>more power) to save the engine because they know that they’ve got that advantage over the other teams

      1. Didn’t I see somewhere that the Mercedes had used 99+kg of their allowed 100kg of fuel for the race? And that was after having to lift and coast 50m before the corners for a good portion of laps in the second half of the race? To me, that suggests there wasn’t much extra pace available for Mercedes in Montreal beyond what they have shown.

      2. That wouldn’t be too surprising; they were quite confident about going the full first six races with just the one engine. Let’s hope Ferrari can pull off something special one of these days so we can see how Mercedes does when it’s under real pressure.

        1. Let’s hope Ferrari can pull off something special one of these days so we can see how Mercedes does when it’s under real pressure.

          Didn’t we already see in Malaysia?

          1. you saw Lewis lose almost two free practice sessions in Malaysia. Which hampered his setup and race pace. And probably hurt Nico’s side of the garage on setup too.

            1. last years fastest qualifying time by Massa was 1:08.759.
              what do’s that tell you?
              lots still to come from these cars yet.

            2. Lol.. For any driver to win, the others must be doing something wrong..

    4. Is it the FIA GPS he is talking about?

    5. GPS positioning? Any wonder that fans are turned off…

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