After the first few races of the 2022 season, it looked to be Ferrari’s year.
Charles Leclerc had built up a comfortable lead in the drivers’ championship while the Scuderia streaked clear in the constructors’ championship, leaving Red Bull and Mercedes in their wake.
But by the end of the season, Red Bull won both title by some margin and the struggling Mercedes almost managed to catch Ferrari, due to a catalogue of mistakes by the team.
The pit stops were a particular problem for the team last season, not so much the time it takes to change the tyres, but the decisions made surrounding the stops.
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The Monaco and Hungarian Grand Prix saw completely the wrong tyre choices made, while the race in Spa saw Leclerc pitted for the fastest lap, which in turn saw him lose a position to Fernando Alonso.
The Scuderia are now looking to find the small margins that will make a difference in 2023 and the pit stops appear to be something that they are focussing on.
Diego Loverno, the engineer in charge of the assembly departments, had claimed that the team will do thousands of pit stops before F1 heads to Bahrain, with the Ferrari crew now practicing 20 stops, three times per week.
He has explained that the goal is for every stop to be under three seconds, increasing their drivers’ chances of winning races.
“Those under three seconds are considered very good. Up to three and a half seconds are good, but not perfect, under four seconds they are inadequate and above four and a half seconds we consider them failures,” said Loverno.
Despite 73 percent of Ferrari’s pit stops being under three seconds last season, which was better than Red Bull’s 71 percent, the team are not satisfied.
“We could consider ourselves satisfied, but we are not, because our target was to reach 80 percent and we weren’t able to capture it.
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“In addition to trying to bring everyone towards the same threshold, this year we have decided to make the functions more flexible and so a gunslinger can also train in replacing the wheel.
“In 2023 the intention is to improve, avoid losing a wheel in a pit stop as happened last year. It wasn’t the mechanic who had the wrong position, but the call from the car had come too late.”
With Fred Vasseur at helm, Ferrari will be hoping for a much smoother and efficient title challenge in 2023, with the aim of ending their frustratingly long title drought.