Ferrari was the only team besides Red Bull to win a race last year and took five pole positions over the final nine races of the season.
So while other front-running teams like Mercedes decided early on they needed to totally overhaul their car design to get on terms with Red Bull, Ferrari wanted to retain their SF-23’s strengths while addressing its weaknesses.
The SF-24, presented on Tuesday, aims to do exactly that. It is not a huge departure from last year’s car but Ferrari believe they have worked out how they can extract more potential from it and address its extreme sensitivity to changes in conditions, something they made progress with over the final races of 2023, which allowed its qualities to shine.
The team made a strong start to the current F1 rules era at the beginning of 2022. Its F1-75 won the first two races of that season and propelled Charles Leclerc into championship contention.
Chassis technical director Enrico Cardile does not believe the team’s subsequent lapse in form at the beginning of last season was due to off-season changes to the technical regulations which led them to make changes to its floor. He says they simply exhausted the development options with their original philosophy and needed a change of direction.
“I don’t think that the regulation changes affected what we did,” he told media including RaceFans. “To start with the 2022 car concept was a good one but at the end of the day, in terms of how far we could have gone with this concept was less than with the new concept.
“It was just a matter of how high is the peak of performance you can reach with that concept or with the other concept. So the 2022 car was a good car providing good performance, very stable, but when we started to add downforce to the car we strongly believed that the new concept will allow us to go more far than the previous one.”
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The team “reached a kind of asymptote on what we could do with the car” under the previous design, said Cardile, and it “was crucial to revamp the completely the architecture of the car” in order to improve the performance of its floor. Significantly, he also claimed the direction Ferrari has gone in “will be pretty common across the grid” this year.
Teams’ choices of suspension configuration have been a particular point of interest this year, as Red Bull and McLaren enjoyed success with their front pull-rod configurations last year. Ferrari has not embraced the same solution, but Cardile believes they won’t be held back by their preference for a push-rod, which Mercedes, Aston Martin and others also continue to use.
“We tested, for a couple of years, a push-rod suspension,” Cardile explained. “In reality, our rear suspension is a bit different in terms of wishbone set-up and lower wishbone distribution compared to a Red Bull one, to mention one team. And we recorded good aero results moving towards this direction, while moving from push-rod to pull-rod we didn’t measure a big advantage as such to justify some compromise in terms of weight or compliance. So from there we evolved our suspension, keeping the same layout.”
However while “the front is pretty much a carry-over of last year in terms of concept,” Cardile says some revisions have been made to the suspension geometry at the rear of the car. “The main differences compared to last year’s car are on the rear where the suspension is differently located,” he said.
“Inside the gearbox is also a different concept which for us has been an innovation because there’s a different way to manage the inboard suspension compared to what we did in the past.”
Ferrari has also focused on improving its straight-line speed. This has meant altering many of the different rear wing trim levels it chooses from during a year based on how much downforce it requires at each track.
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“Part of the development of this year’s car has been also to revamp completely the rear wing,” said Cardile. “The car has been already presented with a new mid-downforce rear wing. We are revamping accordingly pretty much all the range we have. So we focus our attention also on the rear wings.”
A key measure of the success of Ferrari’s latest design will be whether they can improve their car’s performance over a stint without sacrificing the single-lap performance which yielded a total of seven pole positions last year.
“When we talk about driveability, part of the driveability is how easy it is to extract the performance, which could be done with a light car, new tyres on one single lap then becoming trickier and trickier during the race while the tyres wear, the wind changes and so on,” Cardile explained.
“So the focus of increasing the durability of the car is to have a better performance also in a race. The intention would be to put together the two worlds: Keeping being a competitive car in quali but with a platform more friendly, more exploitable also during the race, with a better performance in race.”
This has been tackled through aerodynamic changes. “The driveability content has been achieved with the aerodynamics of the car by shaping the map and giving priority to some aspects of the aerodynamics instead of others.”
However the team won’t be able to judge whether that problem has been solved without compromising the car’s single-lap performance until they have run more extensively. “What will happen with this new platform during the season in terms of compromising the quali session for the race session is something we will see when we will be on track,” Cardile concluded. “Now is too early to say if this car will be more competitive in race at than in quali like has been the past cars.”
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