- [Announcer] A portion of this video is sponsored by Constant Contact. - 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. (upbeat music) Thank you to Constant Contact for sponsoring this portion of this video. As the Y's Shawn Cory Carter once said, "I'm not a businessman. I'm a business, man." And since I'm at the office so much making content for you guys, I realized I needed space here to support my business needs. That's why I secretly built this. While this secret lair allows
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the link in the description to try it for free today. And soon enough, maybe you'll have your own secret office like me. Nolan, what are you doing here. - Jerry, what is this place? - [Announcer] Thanks to Constant Contact for sponsoring that portion of this video. - 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.
it’s actually really smart how they tricked the sensors
Binotto is a severely underrated team principal
Donut and F1 content makes me happy. I feel I've heard these points made so many times in other videos, but Donut's production really elevates it.