Ferrari’s terrible New Years
Reports suggest Ferrari has had what is described as a terrible start to the new year with them being barred from a crucial meeting about the 2026 regulations, and then lost $55m in income from sponsors.
Ferrari hope to propel Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz into challenging Red Bull’s Max Verstappen for the 2023 championship having appointed Fred Vasseur as their new team principal, replacing Mattia Binotto who resigned after criticism for his strategy errors.
According to Racing News 365, the Italian manufacture was barred from a meeting in December about the 2026 engine regulations. This was after the team missed the deadline to confirm its entry for 2026 when they missed the revised date of mid-November.
Its also reports that Ferrari. Has lost around 25% of its income around £91m worth of income after Crypto company Velas and chip semi-conductor company Snapdragon, ended sponsorship. There was acrimony between Ferrari and Velas, the report states.
Mercedes also had a major sponsor from the crypto world, FTX, withdraw due to going bankrupt.
Teams believe they can find half a second
Teams believe that they will need to recover half a second’s worth of one lap of performance because of the rule changes aimed at reducing porpoising. The number of drivers complaining about the cars bouncing and potential long-term impacts on drivers’ health forced the FIA to introduce a metric to try to eradicate the phenomenon.
Midway through 2022, the governing body introduced an Aerodynamic Oscillation Metric (AOM), F1’s governing body also pushed through changes to the 2023 technical regulations. That caused controversy as some teams felt that gave the governing body a direct say in the way the teams set up the cars.
One of the key ones was a 15mm raising of the floor edges, which is aimed at discouraging teams from wanting to run their cars so close to the ground where the porpoising problem rears its head. FIA technical director Nikolas Tombazis is sure that the rule tweaks were essential as he opened up on the kind of performance loss that teams could be expected to be hit with.
Tombazis told Motorsport.com about the decision to change the rules, “I’ve got no doubt we did the right thing. We tried to find a pragmatic, short-term solution and a medium-term solution. It won’t necessarily dissipate [porpoising] completely, but it will be a step less.”
Asked how much downforce teams will be expected to lose, Tombazis said: “Not too much. I would have thought they’re going to lose about 15 to 20 points of downforce which maybe corresponds to about half a second, or something like that. Maybe. But then of course development will probably exceed that.”
While several teams were caught out by the scale of porpoising last year, the Frenchman believes that no one anticipated it. He says there were some smug comments from the history department, but no one predicted the scale of the issue properly.
He says there was a massive change after Baku when they knew what happens.
Although teams and the FIA do now have a better grip on the porpoising issue, Tombazis thinks it would be wrong to think that the problem will go away completely. Adding “I think it’s going to be reduced inherently with the changes. But whether exactly we will have gone far enough from the edge of it, or whether we’ll occasionally dip into it, we’ll have to see.”
Challenges faced by Williams’s new team principal
While the team principal merry-go-round dominated the last month of 2022 there is one position left unfilled at Williams. In December the team announced the departure of both Jost Capito and technical director François-Xavier Demaison signalling that owners, Dorilton Capital, to clean house and go in a different direction.
A month on after saying it would announce their replacements “in due course,” the team are still to announce their new team principal and technical director. While the team made steps forwards last year scoring points in five races, they slipped from being the ninth to the tenth fastest team, but they did decide to halt development of the car.
In an interview conducted in Abu Dhabi, prior to his exit from the team, Capito said the call to make the early switch to 2023 around Silverstone time meant there was no excuse for standing still this year. he said, “Next year, we have to do a step forward, otherwise it’s something really wrong. We’re still not there where the others are.”
It’s a frank assessment of where Williams sits right now. While the team may have made decent progress compared to the doldrums of 2019 and 2020, the obvious highlights coming courtesy of George Russell in his final season with the team, it is still recovering from years of underinvestment when its priority was survival, not its revival.
It takes time to recover and other teams will have their investments coming online this year and which will have a short term impact while they get up to speed. Demaison said about the internal changes “For many reasons, mostly financial, Williams has been stuck a bit in the past.”
While it has to make these moves in order to catch up, there is the added effect of rivals spending the money on areas that bring more performance, causing the gap to grow again. They’re never standing still. It’s something felt even more deeply under the budget cap, the true impact of which is still yet to be felt in making it a truly level-playing field.
This is why then the team are looking to invest, the team are needing to work themselves into spending at the cap level alongside other investments. Williams will focus on being smart in where it invests while it takes time to regroup, but it also needs to keep moving forward on track.
Its constructors’ finish for the past five seasons reads 10-10-10-8-10, a trend it will badly want to change sooner rather than later. Dorilton may have the money to help turn the team around, yet it will also want to ensure the outfit remains an attractive proposition to interested partners. It’s a tricky trade-off, investing for the future while focusing on the now.
Alpine announces 2023 car launch
Alpine has announced it will launch its 2023 car, the A523, on Thursday 16th February in central London. The team made the announcement on social media on Wednesday afternoon.
The car will follow the naming pattern that started when the Renault-owned squad was rebranded as Alpine in 2021, taking the A523 name, and will be launched in London. It makes Alpine the fourth team to confirm its launch date ahead of the new season, following AlphaTauri (11 February), Aston Martin (13 February) and Ferrari (14 February).
The French manufacturer goes into this year with Pierre Gasly joining the team from Alpha Tauri to partner Esteban Ocon, after Fernando Alonso left to join Aston Martin. Alpine finished fourth in last year’s constructors’ championship, marking its best season since 2018 as Ocon and Alonso took eighth and ninth respectively in the drivers’ standings.
Last year the team finished best of the midfield in fourth ahead of McLaren. However, they have targeted reliability as the main area to improve, as well as the power unit for this year. Alonso was left frustrated about the number of points he lost through the year due to issues that meant he failed to see the chequered flag on six occasions.
In a bid to remedy the reliability issues, engine partner Renault is set to revise the design of the water pump for this season, but there are no plans to sacrifice outright engine performance.
