Scuderia Ferrari have arguably has the fastest car this season; however, it’s also been the most unreliable by a country mile.
The Italian team sits 97 points behind Red Bull Racing in the Constructors’ Championship, after a series of strategic errors and horrific power unit reliability.
Charles Leclerc has retired from the race lead twice this season due to a power unit failure, whilst Carlos Sainz retired from P3 at the Austrian Grand Prix after his PU technically exploded.
Whilst the failures have put a huge dent in Ferrari’s title hopes, Sainz admitted after Austria that he’d rather suffer the failures, then have an “underpowered engine”.
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“I’d rather take that step and get through that bump than have an underpowered engine that is more reliable”.
Ferrari team principal Mattia Binotto has even revealed that the failures haven’t been a surprise, after finally admitting that the Italian’s “prioritised performance over reliability”.
“I’m not completely surprised by what happened,” Binotto told the Italian edition of Motorsport.com.
“I don’t think we pushed too hard [in developing the engine] because you can never have enough performance. But we certainly prioritised performance over reliability.
“We pushed the limits on performance beyond what a normal plan would have been for reliability. We knew it would be important to get ahead of the four-season ‘freeze’ on the competition to unlock.”
Strategic and driver errors aside, had Leclerc won the two races he was leading when he suffered the PU failures, then he’d be 50 points better off than he is now.
It would’ve meant he’d still be right in the mix for the Drivers’ Championship; however, it’s more likely that he’ll suffer another PU failure than win the title.
Binotto has explained that Ferrari’s desperation to build the most powerful PU on the grid meant that over the winter, reliability was somewhat forgotten about.
The Ferrari boss knew that his team’s reliability situation “wasn’t ideal”, but that during the winter they discovered “no problems” with the PU’s reliability.
“That doesn’t mean we came to the first race and thought we were completely unreliable. It wasn’t like that,” said the team boss.
“There were no problems during the winter tests. But we knew our situation wasn’t ideal.”
Ferrari will be hoping for a return to winning ways after the summer break, with a triple-header immediately facing all the teams.
Ferrari’s issues have been so bad, that Max Verstappen could miss the entire triple-header and still lead the championship by at least two points.
That’s on the basis that Leclerc wins all three races and claims the fastest lap at each, something which is incredibly unlikely to happen.