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- In the 2020 Formula 1 season,
Ferrari finished sixth out of 10th
in the Constructors' Championship,
their worst performance in 40 years.
According to their own test driver,
they had the worst engine on the grid.
And that's in part because in 2019, they bent the rules,
or as some would say, they cheated.
And unfortunately the FIA struck
a confidential deal with Ferrari.
So no one really knows how they cheated.
Well today on B2B, we're gonna break down the science
on how they cheated and then look at how Ferrari
re-engineered their engine in 2021
to get back to not sucking.
Let's go.
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Thank you to Constant Contact
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- Ferrari is the most successful Formula 1 team of all time.
They have more pole positions, more Grand Prix wins
and more Constructors' Championship than any other team.
So if anyone can come back from a disastrous season,
Ferrari can do it.
But why do they have to make a comeback at all?
What the heck happened
to make their 2020 season so terrible?
Well, Ferrari's worst season since the disco era
actually started in 2019 with a cheating scandal.
Ferrari's 2019 car, the SF90,
seemed unusually fast, especially at high speed,
power hungry circuits like Monza and Spa.
Other F1 teams suspected that Ferrari was making extra power
by breaking the rules on fuel delivery.
The FIA limits fuel flow rate to 100 kilograms an hour
and installs a sensor on each car to monitor this.
The sensor, it's called a fuel flow meter
and its job is to do exactly that.
Monitor the fuel rate so the FIA can make sure
you're not squirting more fuel into the engine
than what's allowed by the rules.
And this meter is placed between the low pressure pump
inside the fuel tank, and the high pressure pump
mounted on the engine.
The fuel flow meters use the ultrasonic
time of flight principle to measure
the velocity of the fuel flowing through
a straight section of fuel line.
It starts with a short burst of ultrasound
generated by a transducer located at one end of the tube,
traveling the same direction of the fuel.
A short time later, an identical burst
from a transducer at the other end of the tube
is sent in the opposite direction
against the direction of fluid flow.
In one direction, you have the speed of sound
plus the speed of the fluid.
In the other direction, you have the speed of sound
minus the speed of the fluid.
A sensor then measures the time it takes
that wave of ultrasound to hit the sensor
in each of the two directions
and subtracts one from the other.
This ends up giving a value which is proportional
to the velocity of the fuel.
And if you know the cross-sectional area of the line,
you can calculate the flow rate.
And they tie this meter into the car's wiring harness,
where the data is shared
between the team and its ECU and the FIA.
But say you wanna squirt more juice
into your Italian stallion so that it'll go faster
without this fuel flow meter ratting you out to the FIA.
Well, there are a couple ways you can do it.
You can either run at max flow rate,
even when you don't need it, and then save that fuel
in a separate tank for later use.
You cash the fuel upstream of the meter,
or you can trick the meter itself.
When these fuel meters first hit the scene,
there were technical directives and rule changes
to prevent teams from doing the first method.
But what about option two?
Get tricky and trick the meter?
Now, any sensor that's on an F1 car has a sampling rate.
How many times per second a sample is taken.
For the fuel flow meters, that rate is 2.2 kilohertz,
meaning it takes 2200 samples every second.
We actually plotted that
and this is what it looks like here.
Every 0.00045 seconds, we get a piece of data.
And the amplitude of that single point of data
corresponds to the flow rate.
If it's higher than 100 kilograms an hour,
then you're busted.
But I'm Ferrari, and I need more fuel.
I need it.
I need that fuel.
So could I hide those pesky peaks
that are telltale sign of me cheating?
If you can cheat the test, you can beat the rest.
Every MLB player in the '90s.
Lance Armstrong.
He said it, not me.
And you can hide those peaks in a few ways.
You can alter the signal by jamming it
or scrambling it so bad that it produces inconsistent
and unreliable data, or you can alter the fuel flow itself.
The electric pumps in F1 cars don't deliver
a constant stream of fuel flow.
They're pulsed.
It's similar to how a fuel flow meter work.
Those points of data dip down and dip back up.
They're on, off.
And that on, off is super fast.
It's 2200 times a second
but there's still time when it's off.
If we were to make a similar graph
of the fuel flow from the pump that's pulsing,
it creates a graph similar to the wave form of the meter.
Now, what if we could phase those pulses of the pump
to supply more fuel when the meter is in the off stage?
So by the time the meter turns back on,
the fuel pulse has dropped back down
to its maximum allowed rate,
tricking the sensor into thinking
that the max flow rate never went beyond
100 kilograms an hour.
Remember, the fuel flow meter is tied into the team's ECU,
so they can synchronize the sampling rate
with the pump's pulse rate,
constantly adjusting the pump's output to the meter.
Tricky, tricky, buff pony boys.
Now, I don't know how,
but the Red Bull team smelled something fishy
over at Ferrari.
So doing what Red Bull does best,
they designed several possible systems
that could fool or bypass the mandatory fuel flow sensor
and submitted these designs as request
for clarification to the FIA.
Their thought was, hey, we got a good idea
that they're cheating.
So we're gonna show this to the FIA
and then ask them if it's allowed.
They will then have to make a ruling on it.
They're gonna draw a line right in the sand
on what is and isn't legal.
They snitched, but they snitched
in the most dirty way possible.
Now, the FIA responded with several technical directives.
These are updates or changes to the technical regulations.
That's the main rule book of Formula 1.
That's what the formula stands for.
It was these directives that said
the systems Red Bull described were prohibited
by the rules around fuel delivery.
Any team using these systems
would be in violation of Formula 1 rules.
And funny enough,
immediately after the directives were released,
the Ferrari car got noticeably slower.
The FIA launched an investigation into Ferrari,
but after several months, they reached an agreement
that would remain confidential.
This was to protect Ferrari's intellectual property
from public release, and in exchange,
Ferrari agreed to help the FIA
to improve the monitoring of all Formula 1 power units,
as well as assist in FIA and other regulatory duties.
It's like the FBI hiring a hacker,
except the hacker is a billion dollar luxury car company.
In total, there were seven technical directives
resulted from the scandal,
and these included increased monitoring of the fuel flow
and new sensors to monitor energy from the hybrid system.
The new rules also limited the maximum amount of oil
which could be consumed during racing
or present in the intake,
in case that's what Ferrari had been doing.
Small amount of oil in the intake
of most turbocharged engines is normal
because oil is used to cool the turbo.
But one of the proposed theories about Ferrari's extra power
was that they engineered a controlled oil leak
at their intercooler.
The flammable oil provided a little boost of extra fuel
when it reached the engine.
This was now also explicitly illegal.
But come on, this is an Italian car.
Sure, there was an engineered oil leak.
It's supposed to be that way.
Nobody knows for sure if any,
or all of those technical directives forced changes
that affected Ferrari's power output.
But what we do know
is that their power was affected for 2020.
In pre-season testing, the SF90's replacement,
the SF1000 was nearly a second slower per lap
than the previous year's car.
Meaning it had an estimated loss of about 65 horsepower.
That power loss was bad,
but the main issue slowing the car
seemed to be the relationship
between the engine and the car's aerodynamics.
The 2020 bodywork had been designed
around the previous more powerful engine.
The revised, less powerful engine
couldn't overcome the drag from that bodywork.
Ferrari was left struggling throughout the 2020 season,
unable to find the right configuration
for the SF1000 within the allowable adjustments.
But in the break between 2020 and 2021,
Ferrari engineers, they got to work.
They extracted more power out of their SF100's engine,
or more specifically, its power unit.
An F1 power unit or PU is a hybrid system
using a 1.6 liter turbocharged gas engine,
and two electric motor generator units or MGUs.
The MGU H recovers heat from the exhaust
and uses that energy to spend the turbo, reducing lag.
The MGU K, which used to be called Kurz,
recovers kinetic energy from braking.
It's connected to the gasoline engine's drive shaft
and supplements the power going to the wheel.
A complex system like an F1 power unit must be engineered
so that everything works together in harmony.
And if you change one thing, then the whole system suffers.
So hypothetically, let's say you raise the total fuel flow
above 100 kilograms an hour,
the maximum allowed by the FIA.
Then you would have to change other parts
of that power unit to make use of that extra fuel.
If you didn't take away that extra fuel,
the power unit wouldn't work properly as a system
and would make less power as a whole unit.
The biggest change they made this year
was using the super fast head.
The super fast head increased air and fuel flow speed,
not fuel flow volume,
which is what got them in a mess to begin with.
That extra speed increases fuel atomization.
That means the hydrocarbons in the gasoline
and the oxygen molecules in the air
are more thoroughly and evenly mixed
when they reach the cylinders.
Greater atomization leads to faster combustion,
because the flame can propagate
through an even mixture more quickly.
The super facet head also increases pressure
in the combustion chamber, meaning more fuel
and more air get burned, which produces...
James!
- More power, baby.
- Of course, to make the super fast head work,
Ferrari has to maximize the amount of air
getting into the engine.
And for that, a lot of attention
has been paid to the turbo system.
They've revised the compressor
and made it smaller to make it easier to spin up.
That means the energy from the MGU H
is used more efficiently.
They've also repositioned the intercooler,
so the intake air will be colder, making it more dense.
Cooler air is more dense, which means you get more of it.
Got more air, got more fuel, you got more power.
While none of these changes are revolutionary by itself,
they add up to an increase of about 20 horsepower.
That might not sound like much, but it's a start.
Ferrari claims that it'll put them on par with Renault
and the Honda-powered Red Bull.
Of course, like we talked about before,
once the engine is making more power,
there are other parts of the car
need to be adjusted to match.
Now, the development freeze for 2021
didn't include everything.
So you can still work on side impact structures,
small aerodynamic components like vortex generators,
basic suspension components like wishbones,
which are control arms, and cooling systems.
All those can be altered.
So numerous small parts have been changed for the SF21,
all in the name of reducing drag
and improving aerodynamics overall.
One of the main sources of drag in 2020
were the side mounted radiators.
The inlet for these have been narrowed to reduce drag,
and refined to make better use of incoming air.
For anything other than small revisions like these,
the FIA introduced a token system.
Each team, they get two tokens to spend
on specific parts of the car,
which they are then permitted to redesign.
Different parts have different token costs,
based on their importance for performance.
Single token parts include the clutch, DRS,
brakes and pit stop equipment.
If a team wants to alter more significant parts,
they have to spend two tokens.
For example, they could choose to redesign
the inboard suspension components like shocks and springs,
or the electrical system or the driver's cockpit.
It's like when you're at Chuck E. Cheese's
and you have all your tickets and you go up to the booth
and you're like, "I can get a pencil eraser
or a pack of sweet tarts.
Or I could just walk behind the counter
when you're not there and steal whatever I want."
Don't do that.
Ferrari has been having significant problems
with aerodynamics.
So, guess what they chose.
The gearbox.
Wait, what?
Well, as it turns out, this was actually a genius move.
By choosing to modify the gearbox,
they're also permitted to redesign sections
of the body work around it at the rear of the car.
That includes rear suspension attachment points,
which were altered to move the car rearward.
And they did that because they saw success that Mercedes had
with that suspension design.
Choosing the gearbox meant engineers could sculpt
their rear bodywork to minimize drag
while maximizing downforce at the rear ring.
The FIA implemented mandatory reductions
in downforce for 2021,
which has slowed every car down on the grid.
Every team has been struggling to compensate for that,
with teams like AlphaTauri and Alpha Romeo
spending their token specifically on aerodynamic redesigns.
Ferrari's LeClerc had significant trouble specifically
with the rear end grip in 2020,
and by resculpting just the rear of the car
around the gearbox, Ferrari is able
to make aerodynamic improvements that affect everything
from the rear ring to the passage of air under the floor
without specifically spending tokens on aerodynamics.
Freakin' smart, dude.
So the million dollar question is, will it all work?
Enrico Gualtieri, the director
of Ferrari's power unit department,
claims the new engine improvements alone
are worth a 10th of a second per lap.
Binotto is cautiously optimistic,
saying that Ferrari needs three or four races
to fully understand the true potential
of its 2021 Formula car.
And I don't want to give you any spoilers,
but they're doing pretty good in this season so far.
There's only been two races since we've filmed this episode,
and they're number four in the standings.
Will that change by the time this comes out?
I don't know.
I don't have a magic ball.
In the fifth round this season,
Ferrari cars are going to place...
- [Assistant] Second.
- And? - Did not start.
- At the rate that Ferrari is going,
it looks like they're going to have
a successful 2021 season, but who knows?
Leave a comment down below.
Let me know if you think Ferrari made a comeback.
Did they re-engineer their car better?
Did they cheat? Are they cheating in another way?
I don't know.
Maybe they are.
Maybe they got us focused on one thing
so they can dabble on another part of the car.
Put some comments down below.
Let me know what you think.
Thank you guys so much for watching this episode of "B2B."
Follow us on Instagram @DonutMedia.
Follow me @JeremiahBurton.
Until next week, bye for now.