Prior to the start of pre-season F1 testing on February 22, Scuderia Ferrari team has dropped a teaser video of its 2016-spec engine.
With one of the strongest driver line-ups in the field, consisting of 2007 world champion Kimi Raikkonen and four-time title winner Sebastian Vettel, Ferrari will be hoping to improve on its 2015 performance, where it finished second, by taking the fight to Mercedes and in particular, Lewis Hamilton.
This year, entrants will continue to use a turbocharged 1.6-liter V6 combined with two motor generators. However, in an attempt to make the powertrains sound better, regulation changes now stipulate that a separate exhaust wastegate must be installed in all cars.
In this video, Ferrari’s power unit certainly sounds better at idle than in 2014 or 2015-spec one.
Of course, no amount of engine or exhaust tweaking will ever make the turbo’d V6s sound nearly as good as the screaming V8s, V10s and V12s of the past, but those days are long gone.