Ferrari have a ‘1000 pit-stop’ plan in preparation for the season ahead

To get to their goal of winning the title in 2023, Ferrari will need to improve many aspects - including pit stops, for which they've devised a plan.

Ferrari have a ‘1000 pit-stop’ plan in preparation for the season ahead

Ferrari

There were a lot of criticisms regarding Ferrari in 2022. They started the year off superbly with a 1-2 finish, and then Charles Leclerc won another race in Austria. But it all started running away from them in Imola – there, Carlos Sainz retired on the first lap while Leclerc made a late mistake. Not a particularly great result, especially considering it was their home race – the circuit is even formally named the ‘Autodromo Internazionale Enzo e Dino Ferrari‘.

After that, little seemed to go their way. Leclerc retired from the lead in Spain, then lost the lead of the championship in the next race in Monaco. His home race was a particularly disappointing one – as the team’s strategy cost him. The team pit him too late at first, which meant that pitting him for dry tires would bear no fruit – he would end up P4. Strategy and reliability doomed them, and in the second half of the season, tire degradation and running the engine lower compounded their misery.

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So, they will definitely be working on these aspects – but also on pit stops. For most of the season, their pitstops were fine, but you can always do better. However, a particularly bad example was found in Zandvoort, when Carlos Sainz was stationary for 12.7 seconds – because the team were late with the fourth tire – it wasn’t even out at that point. So, as per Motorsport Italia, they’ve set up a special space to practice pit stops.

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Ferrari’s goal: 84 percent sub-3-second pit stops in 2023

Ferrari
Ferrari

In this specific space that has been set up for practice, two teams of Scuderia Ferrari mechanics train three times a week on doing 20 pit stops per session. The end goal is for the team to train 1000 pit stops before the season opener in Bahrain. Red Bull are particularly known for their quick pit stops – in fact, at the same time that Carlos Sainz had his disastrous 12.7-second pit stop, Sergio Perez’s pit stop was only 2.0 seconds.

One interesting fact is that Red Bull only had 71% sub-3-second pit stops, while Ferrari had 73%. But their target was to get to 80%. The man in charge is Diego Ioverno, the Chief Engineer of Vehicle Operations. As for their pit stop target times and ‘classifications’, he said: “Those under 3 seconds are considered very good, up to 3.5 seconds are good, but not perfect, under 4 seconds are inadequate and over 4.5 seconds: we consider them failures.”

For 2023, according to Ioverno, the team’s goal is to have 84% of their pit stops be under 3 seconds. In addition to that, they also aim to reduce the number of ‘failed’ pit stops, which was 9% for 2022. Their goal is not exactly to have the fastest pit stops, but to ‘raise the average level of the team’. If Ferrari can get at their level, it’ll be a big boost in the 2023 title fight, that they are likely to be a part of.

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