Will Ferrari Yet Again Fail to Emulate Pre-Season Testing Success at the Opening F1 Race Weekend?

The most successful team in F1 is back with a bang. At least that’s what the fans thought when Ferrari unveiled a brand new F1-75 for the 2022 season. The car’s performance in Barcelona and Bahrain has been brilliant as well. However, that’s not all in cards, Gary Anderson explains.

Gary Anderson is the former Racing car designer. In his interview with The Race, he believes that the performance Ferrari showed lately might not be entirely true. The team has performed well in the tests before as well, but they were far from their race day performances.

Talking about this, Anderson conveyed, “To answer this means you have to look a bit deeper and consider last year and the year before that, specifically what happened from testing to going racing. Recent years suggest that Ferrari probably runs its car a little bit lighter than Red Bull and/or Mercedes in testing. And when it goes racing, it doesn’t improve. If anything, it drops back a fraction.”

“So I don’t see why Ferrari would change that philosophy and have a whole different mindset now.”

“We know that teams further back tend to try to go for a bit of a glory run because it’s quite important for the sponsors and for the team’s motivation. Ferrari is not in that territory and runs a sensible fuel load in testing usually….,” the British designer further stated.

Read More: Ferrari Joins the Sandbagging Bandwagon as Binotto Dismisses F1-75 Race-Winning Potential

What went wrong with Ferrari over the years?

The Italian team has faced a lot of criticism for their dip in performance lately. Once a very successful team now ends their season, mostly in the upper mid-table position. The Maranello-based team has won their last Constructor’s Championship in 2008 and surprisingly, Charles Leclerc gave them their last win in 2019.

It’s quite shocking to accept that a team like Ferrari hasn’t tasted a race win in the last two years. As of recent stats, Ferrari finished in P3 last year, behind Mercedes and Red Bull. However, with signs of a comeback, the fans thought this might be their year.

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Talking about the pre-season and race day performances, Ferrari has shown similar behavior in the past as well. Their pre-season testing performance was as good as Red Bull and Mercedes. Despite such delivery, they lacked pace on race day. As the new season dawns, once again the Italian team showed brilliance in testing. It’ll be interesting to see if they can get over this phase finally.