Can Ferrari Continue Winning? | F1TV Tech Talk | Crypto.com

Welcome to Mexico City and Formula One's highest circuit, where keeping the car cool is one of the biggest challenges for the engineers on the entire calendar. Coming up in this week's Tech Talk, we'll chat about McLaren's new floor, Williams' split upgrade package and Ferrari's extreme cooling. But first, we've got to talk about last weekend, don't we? It was a slightly unexpected event in terms of the race result, the two Ferraris coming up front, and also the Ferrari-powered Haas cars looking really, really good. And we've seen your comments. We know a lot of you wanted us to take a deep dive into all of those gorgeous, intricate technical details on the Haas cars. And of course, we're going to do that next week. Let's take a look, though, at Ferrari, because Ferrari did take us a little bit by surprise. Coming into the US Grand Prix weekend, we expected them to bring a large upgrade package, but they didn't do that, instead deciding to bed in with some unseen upgrades, perhaps. But the aerodynamics at all parts that we'd seen previously seem to work for them around Austin. But is that the full story? And can Ferrari take an un-upgraded car all the way to the end of the World Championship and win it without making any major technical upgrades? Well, we put that question to the team, and here's what they had to say. It's a relative sport, and I've spoken in the past about our development process, and we don't cherry-pick data that seems to prove or disprove what's going on. You have to take a bit of a global view. You have to take a bit of an overview. And so three, four races into the mid-season, Barcelona onwards, you stand back and you think, OK, we've lost our way a little bit here. And as I've said before, the proof of your process is that you can get back on track, and then you look at the last three or four races, Austin in particular, and you take a global view and you say, it's a relative sport, and relatively, we've clearly made progress. So I think we're all very encouraged by that. We maximised our performance at the weekend in every respect. Pit stops were great. Drivers did a great job. Not from the easiest positions on the grid. We had to work a bit. But yeah, it was a really good performance all round. And you sort of think, actually, this championship's not over. Two races ago, you were thinking, oh, this is going to be a good battle between Red Bull and McLaren. Now, we're gunning for McLaren. I think the fight is still on. That's really fascinating stuff there from Jock Clear. And it does feed into a little bit of a conversation, or should we say a debate, we've been having here at the Media and Technology Centre about whether Ferrari's form in Austin really is representative of what they can do for the rest of the season. Well, coming into Mexico City, I really don't think you can extrapolate that result here, because this is a high-altitude circuit, and it does have some really unique demands, not just on the cars, but on the drivers and everything the teams do. And to hear a little bit more about that, we just went up and down the pit lane, asking a few of the teams about what they thought about the Mexican Grand Prix. So Mexico, as we know, we're at a great height, above 2,000 metres. So, of course, the cooling aspect of the car is one of the most important things around Mexico. That's why most of the teams bring a separate cooler package for this circuit, as we did. And it's all about trying to find the balance for the downforce you need, and then also the speed on the straight line, because there is a big straight here, which is always important. It's OK as long as you're prepared for it, and that's the difficult thing. A lot of teams will probably be making specific components for this circuit. They might not use anywhere else, but you have to do it, because otherwise you can't race here. Yeah, we were discussing this yesterday, actually. More and more of the circuits are becoming a bit idiosyncratic. We've gone away from the traditional circuits, which we've all been to for 30 years, and we're going to these circuits, which every one of them offers a little bit of a different challenge. Austin is a very idiosyncratic circuit, and we've come away from there very successfully. You come here, completely different challenges. When you see how much management we need to do when the atmospheric conditions change like this, you realise how on a knife edge these cars are. And you come here, 30% less air, basically, and you have to deal with a lot of issues of cooling. So engine needs to be cooled, all the gearbox needs to be cooled, the driver needs to be cooled, and the brakes need to be cooled. And all of that is, of course, inherent in your package. So everybody's going to have slightly different biases. Some will have brake problems, some will have gearbox temperature problems, but we're all going to be on the ragged edge. And of course, because we don't get the opportunity to test this anywhere else, you know, we're not going to Kyalami, we're not going anywhere that's altitude. This is our first opportunity, and we're into it in FP1, and we're going to be trying to manage the car and obviously trying to find performance. It's great to hear from Sven Smeets, isn't it? I haven't heard from him particularly a lot recently, and I always hark back to the World Rally Championship where he was involved previously. But let's take a look at some of those changes. This is the Ferrari cooling package, and as soon as I saw this, I went, whoa, they have gone pretty extreme. Now, if you're not a regular at looking at the rear ends of Formula 1 cars, this may look fairly normal for the Ferrari for you. But the parts I really want to draw your attention to are these big louvres here, and how deep they come down into the dished sections along the side of the car. Of course, all to do with reducing drag, but also these panels here that they've opened up. Now, opening up all of these panels is hugely draggy, but on a circuit so high in terms of altitude, that drag penalty is almost zero, but keeping the car cool is absolutely critical, as you've already heard. Now, to compare this to the package Ferrari introduced when we first saw this style of rear bodywork on the car, take a look here. You can see there's almost no cooling louvres whatsoever. That front panel, absent altogether. No big slots on the side, just one little slit at the leading edge. That's Ferrari's lowest drag package with this version. When I compare it to this version, the Mexican version, you can really see the difference. It's pretty dramatic. But when you take a look at those louvre shapes closer up, you can see how much further down they come onto the sideboard and this forward section being fully opened up. This is what Ferrari normally run when they're going full cooling specification, kind of like they did in Hungary. You can see this is quite open, but not nearly as extreme as it is in Mexico. So, Ferrari going all out. And I do wonder, with that level of cooling on the rear of the car, do Ferrari have a little bit of a concern about cooling something underneath that bodywork? Is the power unit getting a bit hot? We have seen Ferrari struggle in high temperatures in the past, and these power units aren't that different to those versions, even though changes can be made for reliability reasons. But it's not just Ferrari that's been playing around with their cooling. Everybody up and down the field has been doing it, and we saw Ferrari and Williams having a little bit of a conversation about the cooling packages earlier in this show. Earlier on today in free practice one, we saw out on track Ferrari and Williams having a little bit of a conversation physically out on track, not ending well for either Oliver Behrmann or Alex Albon. But it did give us an opportunity to look at the split cooling packages that Williams are running on their cars. Take a look at Franco Colapinto here. He's departing the track on the left, which I'm not sure why he's doing that, but he is. Have a look at the rear cooling exit at the back end of the car around the exhaust. Look how large it is. Very wide, almost filling the entire width of the rear bodywork. Well, before Alex Albon's rear end got deranged by a slightly odd moment into the barriers, have a look at the same part of Alex Albon's car, and you can see how much tighter the rear end of his Williams is at the start of free practice one. That's a massive change, and clearly Williams is trading off its cooling levels against its drag down the straight, and Williams always had pretty good speed at the end of straight. So maybe they're looking to be able to race through the field with a lower drag design. It's weird, though, because when you look at Albon's car from behind, there's hardly any cooling louvres visible, particularly when you compare it to, say, the Ferrari, which is all whole. The Williams is all skinnied up. It's all slippery, drag reducing. A few small louvre sections here, but they do have more scope for cooling on that car, but they haven't used it all. So that's quite interesting, and I wonder if it speaks to the relative cooling demand of the Mercedes power unit and the Ferrari. But that's not all. I think the most exciting change, the hardest to see of any team on the grid here in Mexico, is this. It's the McLaren. After a lot of deliberation and a lot of back and forth, McLaren has finally chosen to introduce their new floor. One of the reasons it's taken them so long is that they're not entirely confident that fitting a new floor to the car is going to bring with it a huge amount of performance. Despite the fact that all of McLaren's upgrades so far this season seem to have given them a big step forward, a lot of teams have made changes to their floors, most notably Ferrari, Red Bull, and those upgrades have reduced the performance of the car, not improved it. And that is something that McLaren are slightly worried about. So they've held back on introducing this floor until now. So far, only introducing it on one car. They're going to review the data to see if they're going to proceed through the rest of the season or the rest of the weekend even using that new floor on Lando Norris's car. I wonder if it will suffer from the same issues that other teams have seen up and down the pit lane. Crucial moment for the World Championship this as well. Not the only upgrade on McLaren though. They too have mucked about with their cooling package. You can see these big gills, these big louvres down the side of the car. Absolutely stunning design, really aggressive, really draggy. If you compare it to what they normally use, much neater design there. But again, Mexico, it doesn't penalise you for having all of that extra drag. Looking at the car from the rear, you can really see that again. You can see the opening on the centre line, that's much larger than normal. You've got the additional cooler, a cooling exit around the rear suspension. You've got these big gills along the side of the car. Now we compare this layout to their normal cooling levels and you can see it's hardly there at all. They've closed up the bodywork for this race weekend, which was earlier in the season, and you can see it's much more slippery, much lower drag. That's what McLaren normally run with compared to this. And engineering details are what we're going to be studying all the way through the rest of this race weekend and into next week at the Brazilian Grand Prix. Stay tuned for more from Tech Talk.