Formula Won

There is no doubt that 2002 is a year marked in red: Ferrari’s trademark scarlet. The season dominated by Ferrari ended with yet another one-two finish at the Suzuka Circuit in Japan—a fitting end to a campaign that was perfect in every sense. So easily predictable was each race’s outcome that millions of viewers switched off from Formula One, prompting F1 big boss, Bernie Ecclestone to lobby for adverse rule changes ranging from victory ballasts to driver swapping.

Though Ecclestone could think of crazier things to make the sport more “exciting,” the world of Formula One has always been inextricably linked with Ferrari. No other team is more recognizable and more passionate than this Maranello-based outfit. Though the sport is currently playing host to a lot of big time manufacturers ranging from BMW to Jaguar to Honda, the prancing horse marque has always had the biggest fan support anywhere, from Brazil to Japan to Argentina and South Africa.

Currently basking in the glory of his fifth World Championship title, Michael Schumacher has always said that it was the hard work of the entire Ferrari team that made this feat possible. For Schumacher, the countless hours of testing and re-engineering is what made the F2002 Formula One car a winner right out of the box.

The F2002 obliterated the competition, leaving in its wake everything from the brutishly fast BMW-Williams to the super-agile McLaren-Mercedes. The Ferrari won fifteen out of seventeen races; eleven of these were won by Michael Schumacher. Though these two big-budget British-German teams have tried, they’ve all but gotten the formula right when it comes to winning a Grand Prix race. So did Ferrari pull off the seemingly impossible feat of domination? At this point, it’s best to let the car speak for itself.

The Ferrari F2002 comes from a team that prides itself as one of only three manufacturers who did the design and construction of both chassis and engine (Toyota and Renault are the other two). The F2002 comes in as the forty-eighth single-seater in the long, illustrious line of Ferrari cars, conceived specifically to compete in the Formula One World Championship. Though an all-new design, it follows the philosophy set by the previous year’s dominant F2001. The Maranello-based team optimized the overall aerodynamic package, lowered the center of gravity and maximized the performance of the 051 engine. Moreover, in typical Ferrari fashion, they created the F2002 with aesthetically-pleasing curves that make it the sleekest-looking car on the track even when it stands idle.

Achieving one of the best power-to-weight ratios, the F2002 weighs in at a lightweight 600 kilograms with engine, tires and all; while its 3.0-liter dual overhead cam, longitudinally-mounted 40-valve V10 pushes out more than 800 hp. The handmade engine is mated to a factory-designed 7-speed semi-automatic gearbox that give this car a 0-200 km/h time of just a trickle over 3 seconds—far quicker than any production road car or even motor bike in the world.

The carbon-fiber composite chassis is all-new both in terms of design and construction, resulting in a significant weight reduction over the F2001 and even greater structural integrity and overall stiffness. Every little detail from the side pods, radiator ducting, exhaust and the rear part of the car went through painstaking hours in Ferrari’s own full-sized wind tunnel, to make sure that these components give the F2002 better cooling efficiency while increasing the overall aerodynamic performance.

Moreover, Ferrari gave attention to detail that includes the optimization of the performance and consistency of the Bridgestone tires, which led the team to redesign the entire front and rear suspension system. According to Ferrari, even the so-called ‘round, black stuff’ was integrated well into the car’s design, making it an important part of the car’s aerodynamics package.

Not all of the systems were improved from 2001. Because of new technical regulations introduced in 2002, the F2002 had to settle for a mechanically-operated power steering system that actually weighed more than the F2001’s electric-based system.

While cornering performance and agility is important for Grand Prix drivers, there is little doubt that spectators want nothing less than to hear the high-revving scream of a Formula One V10 engine. The most audible aspect of any car’s performance, the engine is the main thing that sends chills down anyone’s spine. Though the Type 051 engine isn’t the most powerful on the grid, everyone agrees that it proved to be the most drivable and reliable of the bunch.

Like its predecessors, the 051 engine is load bearing and mounted in longitudinally along with the transmission. Though made of several space age materials such as titanium, the Magnetti Marelli-fed 17,500-rpm engine must by regulation run on regular unleaded fuel. Ferrari’s technical partner, Shell provided all of the team’s fuel and lubrication needs. The engine oil in particular, was designed to take on extreme heat and stress inside the engine block—more than 8500 g and 300 degrees Celsius!

Since 1998, the extremely hot exhaust of the Ferrari F1 machines has been vented out through huge vents high up in the car’s rear; this approach has been adopted by virtually the entire Formula One field. This special exhaust system enables the gases to flow onto the rear wing of the car, creating more downforce, which in turn pushes the car more onto the ground.

Though the close to 800 hp engine is a virtual carryover of the 2001 specification engine, the novel semi-automatic gearbox spelled the difference for the team. Cast in titanium, the Ferrari-designed gearbox has seven sequential gears, which are hydraulically operated via steering-wheel mounted controls. The transmission and engine of the F2002 has been designed to be as lightweight and compact as possible without sacrificing reliability or durability—like walking on a knife’s edge—something that the Italian team’s rivals need more development with.

In retrospect, though the F2002 was blisteringly fast, much of Ferrari’s design effort was allocated to improving the handling rather than straight line performance. The team did this by lowering the center of gravity, while improving the weight distribution on both the chassis and engine. Though the Ferrari didn’t have any sort of revolutionary technical piece of engineering up its sleeve like an ultra-wide angle engine, or a V10 capable of 18,000 rpm, Ferrari designed its Formula One challenger as an overall package. Treating the engine, suspension, chassis and even tires as one cohesive unit, engineers at Maranello put a lot of emphasis in designing and manufacturing all of the car’s components to the highest standard, ensuring the highest possible levels of safety, performance and reliability in a Formula One racing car.

Ferrari designer Rory Byrne and his team burned the midnight oil and worked until the eleventh hour to bring the F2002 to life. In fact, development time took so long that Ferrari decided to race a slightly tweaked version of the 2001-specifcation F2001 for the first two rounds in Australia and Malaysia. While Michael Schumacher won the Australian Grand Prix in convincing fashion, Ferrari thought that their advantage wasn’t big enough. Though the likes of David Coulthard, Ralf Schumacher and Juan Pablo Montoya already found it hard to keep pace with the F2001, nothing could have prepared them for the F2002.

For the opposition, the F2002 was literally hell on earth. It broke all the rules by doing everything very fast. When it made its debut at the Brazilian Grand Prix, the newer Ferrari proved itself to be a winner, enabling Michael Schumacher to roar first to the checkered flag. Since then, it has eclipsed most of the standing records in Formula One history. By the eleventh race at Magny Cours in France, Michael Schumacher secured his fifth driver’s title, the earliest ever in a Grand Prix season. By the end of the 2002 season, the Michael Schumacher and F2002 combination was able to: clinch the most grand prix victories in a season by a single driver, give Schumacher his first win in Germany, attain the closest Grand Prix finish (0.01 second) with team mate Rubens Barrichello in the Indianapolis Circuit in the United States, and the most grand prix victories by a driver. Not to mention, the F2002 enabled Schumacher to cruise to a one hundred percent finishing record (his lowest being third place), while his team broke most of all the existing lap records for qualifying and the race proper.

The domination showed by Michael Schumacher, Ferrari and the F2002 car prompted the call for drastic changes by several top people in the sport. However, as previously shown by the likes of Formula One’s foremost teams, these talks of curbing performance figures and equalizing teams become moot as engineers from places like Maranello turn to improve their cars more and more, giving performance and reliability unheard of in the sport five years ago.

The F2002 didn’t just shock Formula One’s governing body, but also the sport’s front running teams such as BMW-Williams and McLaren-Mercedes. Both of these teams, as much as they didn’t want to admit it, said they suffered from short comings in producing a competitor to the Italian marque’s challenger. Both admit that to beat Ferrari they have to rely on technologies more revolutionary rather than evolutionary from their current cars.

With that realization, we could see that the 2003 season is shaping up to be another excitement-filled series. With Kimi Raikkonen and Juan Pablo Montoya improving and getting faster than ever, the trip to victory lane shouldn’t be as easy for Ferrari as it was this year. If both these German and British collaborative Formula One companies see their goal as beating Ferrari and each other for this year, Ferrari has set their sights even higher. Designer Rory Byrne surely strikes fear into the competition and into F1’s commercial organizers when he states, “I can tell you that I have got the hammer down as hard as possible to make the fastest car we can. I am sure that it will be better and we will perform to our normal standard.” The record of the most grand prix victories in a single season is still held by McLaren’s Honda-powered MP 4/6 with 15 out of 16 wins—there’s nothing stopping Ferrari from trying to make it 17 out of 17 next year.

By Ulysses Ang | Photos Courtesy of Ferrari S.p.A. and Ultimate Car Page
Originally Published in the January 2003 Issue