Ferrari F92A

The Ferrari F92A is a Formula 1 car that competed in the Formula 1 1992 World Championship.

It is remembered as the second less competitive single-seater-after the 312 T5-never deployed by Scuderia Ferrari in the highest engine category.
Development

Unlike all the Formula 1 Ferraris designed between 1989 and 1991, the F92A did not share any components with the Ferrari 640 F1, which was the starting point for the new single-seater cars built up until the year before.
Considering the poor performance of the cars used in the 1991 season (technically obsolete and unable to keep up with the performance of McLaren and Williams), Ferrari had in fact decided to make a completely new car: bodywork, engine and gearbox were redesigned trying to maximize the efficiency of the chassis and of the aerodynamic conformation (whose development tried to align itself with the latest technological innovations introduced in those years in Formula 1).

aerodynamics
In the field of aerodynamics, the car took up several solutions used in aeronautics on military aircraft, mainly due to the contribution of the aeronautical engineer Jean Claude Migeot, who in those years made many innovative solutions on different Formula 1 cars.
Specifically, taking up a solution introduced by Migeot himself when he was working at the Tyrrell (and destined to a great success), the F92 A was the first Ferrari car of Formula 1 to present a raised nose, connected to the front wing with two parallel uprights, in place of the sloping profile used until the previous seasons. Another peculiar feature was the air intakes of the sides, ovoid and separated by the body of the car, imitating the design trends of military jets (in which the air vents of the engines are always detached from the fuselage to avoid the ingestion of the layer limit). The aesthetics of the car thus earned it the nickname of hunting.
The major innovation, however, concerned the so-called double bottom, which tried to reproduce a Venturi effect comparable to that of the single-seaters of the early 1980s with miniskirts: above the normal flat bottom, imposed by the technical regulation, it had been created another, parallel to the first and forming with it a series of channels that should have generated a high ground effect.
Lastly, the Coca-Cola area was modified, that is, the terminal part of the bodywork that converges towards the gearbox and the rear axle, which assumed a more squared shape.

Engine

From a motorist point of view, the F92A did not deviate much from the previous achievements of the house. The engine, always in the central longitudinal rear position, adopted the classic V12 architecture, with the bank angle corresponding to the canonical 65 ° and, as per regulation, always 3500 cm³ as displacement. The Ferrari kept the five valves per cylinder, always controlled with two overhead camshafts per bank and the recall of traditional springs instead of the pneumatic system of the opponents. This prevented to improve the performance in terms of maximum power by increasing the rotation speed: the spring call, in fact, beyond a certain regime becomes ineffective because it can no longer guarantee contact with the cam, causing a delayed closing of the valve. This engine also lost 35 HP of power compared to that of the previous car.
This classic engine was combined with the classic semi-automatic gearbox, which, however, had only 6 reversed ratios (when from 1990 it was usual to have 7).

Competitive career
Tested in competition, the car turned out to be conceptually incorrect.
The aerodynamic system, which in the computer studies and in the wind tunnel showed excellent performance, in real situations of the track made the car unstable and slow: the high aerodynamic resistance of the car body allowed good performance only in special circumstances, such as for example races with rain (where maximum speeds have a relative importance).
In addition, far from being resolved by the "penalizing" choices (weakened engine and gearbox with fewer gears) the mechanical and structural problems continued to be frequent and cause many withdrawals.
In an attempt to correct the route, Ferrari tried to deploy an evolved version of the car (called Ferrari F92 AT) starting with the Belgian Grand Prix. It was equipped with a more powerful engine, a new aerodynamics considered more suitable for particularly fast circuits (such as Spa, Monza, Estoril, Suzuka and Adelaide) and a new transverse change in place of the previous longitudinal (from which the addition of the letter T in the name). Not even this innovation, however, produced appreciable benefits and the car remained slow and fragile.
For the second year in a row, Ferrari did not get either a victory, a pole position, or even less (unlike the year before) a faster lap in the race. The most important placements he achieved were two third places in the Spanish Grand Prix and the Canadian Grand Prix, on both occasions thanks to Jean Alesi. His team-mate Ivan Capelli (who distinguished himself in previous years at the helm of the Leyton House designed by the English coach Adrian Newey) obtained only two points: the fifth place in Brazil and the sixth in Hungary, being replaced in the last two races of the season by the third driver Nicola Larini, who did not get points.
The Ferrari collected a total of 21 points, equal to less than half of those obtained in 1991: the Maranello team retroceded from third to fourth place in the constructors' classification, also behind Benetton, as well as McLaren and Williams.