The stability of the rules and the possibility of using the same Pirelli tires next year are a great opportunity for the Scuderia, aiming to climb back after the disappointing third place in the Constructors’ Championship. In Maranello, they maximized the Abu Dhabi test day to understand the optimal tire usage, considering the adoption of more extreme suspensions with the same setup.
How should we interpret Ferrari’s 2023 season? Reading the world standings negatively because last year, the SF-75 secured second place in the Constructors’ Championship, while the SF-23 slipped behind Mercedes, finishing with a third position that may bring in fewer funds but more hours of wind tunnel work. However, with a less simplistic analysis, it can be said that the Scuderia showed improvement from the Italian Grand Prix onwards, revealing the hidden potential that the red car had struggled to express, especially during races.
When Charles Leclerc had his best race (achieving a front-row start next to Max Verstappen and finishing second with a non-winning but competitive pace), the Prancing Horse dropped to third place among the teams, mainly because Carlos Sainz wasn’t in the game at Abu Dhabi, as if, after the crash in free practice, he was driving a different car, not even related to Leclerc’s.
Ferrari experienced great inconsistency in performance, and the “downgrade” in favor of Mercedes should not be attributed to the Spanish driver for what happened in Yas Marina but to the repeated mistakes made throughout the season.
During the championship, the Scuderia changed its approach, focusing on developing the red car for maximum aerodynamic load. More downforce didn’t just mean more vertical force but also more porpoising, the endemic issue that F1 must combat with these ground-effect cars. When the aerodynamicists led by Diego Tondi accepted this reality and sacrificed some downforce in the extreme design of the floor, they allowed the SF-23 to be lowered with a more ground-hugging setup, which proved significantly better over a lap.
Moreover, with the arrival of David George in Maranello, the experienced American familiar with the secrets of the Honda power unit and Red Bull, the approach of the engineers led by Enrico Gualtieri in the power unit department also changed. Not so much in the management of the turbocharged 6-cylinder endothermic engine but in the hybrid system. The partitioning of electric power was revised: the energy aimed at enhancing traction qualities in corner exits was excessive, causing acceleration wheel spin and bouncing, leading to premature tire overheating.
By reducing the available torque from the MGU-K, it was possible to reduce clipping at the end of straights: essentially, there was still energy to spend on the straight, allowing Ferrari to compete with Red Bull in terms of top speed. The development token granted for the electronic management of the hybrid system from Monza allowed extracting the true potential from the SF-23, discounting the design errors that will need correction in the 2024 car.
Adrian Newey has already stated that he expects opponents to reach the performance level of the Red Bull RB19 next year, but the English genius is also certain to have kept a significant margin for growth in the RB20. For Ferrari and other competitors (Mercedes, McLaren, and Aston Martin), catching up won’t be easy, but 2024 offers a great opportunity at least to try: the technical regulations remain unchanged, and the tires will be the same as those concluding this championship. There won’t be the need to build a virtual model of the new tire, resetting the parameters used this year, but there will be a significant opportunity to understand how the tires should be exploited in the upcoming season.
The Pirelli tests in Abu Dhabi went somewhat unnoticed due to the absence of novelties, while they were actually strategic for teams aspiring to make a comeback. It’s not surprising, then, that Ferrari was the team that covered the most kilometers in a single day of work. The Cavallino’s technicians can analyze the data from 258 laps (equivalent to the distance of 4.4 GPs) with Robert Shwartzman completing 123 laps, Carlos Sainz 69, and Charles Leclerc 66. The young test driver, along with the regular drivers, conducted various setup experiments, providing valuable insights into tire understanding. Without chasing lap times, the work focused on finding the best correlation between the track and simulation programs, to the extent that the young Russian with an Israeli passport visited Maranello yesterday to assess the “live” reactions of the solutions found in Yas Marina on the simulator.
Meanwhile, in the Sporting Management, the 676 is starting to take shape, meaning the car entrusted to Enrico Cardile: it must be Ferrari’s redemption with a significant reduction in the front section for greater aerodynamic efficiency.
In particular, the chassis has been redesigned to allow the adoption of sidepods with a more extreme undersurface (it is necessary to bring down the lateral intrusion cone, which on the SF-23 was positioned in a way that created a strong aerodynamic blockage) and to facilitate the adoption of a more extreme front suspension, thanks to the greater misalignment of the upper triangle, to favor the anti-dive effect (nose dive during braking), with the rear arm decidedly lower, while maintaining the push rod in front and pull rod in the rear scheme.
Others are not sitting idle, but in Maranello, they have defined the keys to what should be the first year in which Fred Vasseur will have had the freedom to shape his team and the car that must relaunch the ambitions of the Prancing Horse. Otherwise, there will be troubles…
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