- Ferrari
Ferrari addresses power unit's weak points
Ferrari is confident it will have a clear improvement in performance form its power unit as soon as the first race, but it is also saving some major updates for later in the year.
Although it was not the car's only weakness in 2014, the Ferrari power unit was significantly down on power compared to its pacesetters Mercedes, especially during races. The head of Ferrari's power unit department Mattia Binotto said an improvement would be clear from the first race of 2015 in Australia.
"[Last year] the engine was clearly not performant enough compared to our main competitor, and this was one of the weaknesses of last season," Binotto said. "The power unit at the Australian GP will represent a clear improvement, but we believe there are still significant further steps during the season."
Development of the engine is restricted via a token system, which limits the components teams can change in order to control costs. However, this year teams are allowed to spend their development tokens at any point during the season, rather than being forced to use them ahead of the first race, and Ferrari is keen to hold back updates for later in the year - a strategy at odds with rivals Renault.
"Our objective, in term of tokens, is really to spend only few at the start of the season, to maintain a significant opportunity of developments during the season," Binotto added. "The current 2015 PU has already gain a significant amount of performance, and we will keep pushing during the entire season."
Technical director James Allison said his team had prioritised the power unit as an area of improvement and explained some of the problems the team faced last year.
"The power unit has been an area of extremely high effort to improve," he said. "We had a number of issues with last year's engine and power unit. Early on in the season the power delivery was not particularly sophisticated and it was quite tough for the drivers to get the type of throttle response that they wanted. It was improved a lot during the season and we take that a step further for the SF15-T.
"A definite weakness of last year's car was that the amount of electrical energy that we were able to recover from the turbo was not really good enough for producing competitive power levels during the race - one of the reasons why Ferrari's qualifying performance was relatively strong compared to its race performance last year. We've tried to change the architecture of the engine to make it a better compromise between qualifying and racing performance.
"And then there's plain, simple horsepower. An enormous amount of work has gone into all aspects of our combustion efficiency to try to make sure that in this fuel-limited formula where every team is only allowed to burn the same amount of fuel, then every single compression stroke, every single ignition stroke is extracting the maximum amount of horsepower on the road."
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