f1316 wrote: ↑14 Oct 2020, 11:20
timbo wrote: ↑13 Oct 2020, 18:41
gordonthegun wrote: ↑13 Oct 2020, 00:11
Nobody knows anything about the trick
Yes, and I was only hypothesizing about knocking.
But all Ferrari-powered cars suddenly made big gain in qualifying.
It would be interesting thing to check if we have more cold races.
I think you’re spot on. We’ve seen the large cooling outlets as a mainstay on the Ferrari engine cover throughout this year and I personally am surprised that, when you look at the engine layout under the hood, their packaging isn’t much more ‘form fitting’ per the Mercedes (there seems to scope for much tighter packaging that they’re not taking). Both of which point to some kind of cooling issue which they didn’t expect when initially designing the car (I.e. the PU TDS).
To now see a jump in performance from all Ferrari powered cars at the same race, the only real cool race we’ve had, seems too much of a coincidence.
What exactly has caused this is harder to say - but I think it’s reasonable to speculate that some kind of previous oil usage was also helping them regulate temperature/prevent knocking or something of that nature. It could also go some way to explaining why the Ferrari’s PU’s base level performance is so bad - i.e. when removing the ‘tricks’ it’s become the worst PU and I think a lot of people were surprised that the underlying power is not better - as it may be that they’re just not able to run it as they would like.
I agree about the cooling issues, but, for what I can remember, Ferrari has been using extremely large cooling outlets since at least five years and the same is true for Ferrari powered cars.
Only in 2018 (the best Ferrari car since hybrid era, in my opinion), I was surprised to see smaller rear cooling outlets.
In 2019 I saw them become bigger again and the same now.
So, it's clear that for some reason Ferrari needs bigger rear outlets.
It might also be not for cooling but for aerodynamics purposes, to slow the flow of the air with a bigger channelling, to interact in a profitable way with other flows down there or simply to reduce internal sidepods drag.
I don't know, but in this scenario, it's very difficult to understand what is an old or a new problem.