Scuderia Ferrari has been chasing Red Bull since the start of the 2022 Formula 1 championship, a season in which the Maranello team raised hopes for a two-way battle throughout the campaign as the introduction of vastly different regulations had the potential to completely switch up the game. All the teams and Power Unit manufacturers had had to adapt to completely new rules. From an aerodynamic point of view, almost every element to those cars was different from what came before. The aim of those new regulations was to improve the on-track action, enabling cars to follow each other more closely, and therefore be in a better position to attack and battle, as well as having the potential effect of mixing up the competitive order. However, we know very well how it ended. From the summer of 2022 onwards, the Milton Keynes-based team took flight and has been racing in a league of its own, unreachable for any opponent.
We can say that from that precise moment, the Austrian team began to build the unparalleled dominance experienced during the last championship, a season that will sadly be remembered in the annals of Formula 1 as the greatest technical supremacy ever.
Regarding Ferrari, the SF-23 was a car designed badly. There was a congenital inaccuracy between chassis and impact structure that strongly affected performance and the potential for development. A weak front end that forced drivers and technicians to build a setup every race weekend to preserve the front and a rear that couldn’t be loaded too much to avoid unbalancing the aerodynamic platform. In addition to this, the floor was incapable of working properly in certain speed ranges, making the car unpredictable and dangerous, not giving Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz the confidence to fully exploit its characteristics. Fortunately, the SF-24 is of a different caliber.
We are talking about a more predictable car with a stable base. A significantly wider operating window that allows optimizing performance based on the layout of the race track. A front end so solid that it even shows some excess rotation, a general load produced by the floor significantly higher, capable of providing excellent speeds in the mid-to-high range. Although the 2024 Ferrari Formula 1 car still needs time to be judged clearly, we can undoubtedly define it as better than its predecessor.
To do this, today, we rely on the data collected and subsequently processed in the computers. A mathematical field capable of providing a precise calculation regarding the performance of the latest aero-mechanical engineering work designed in the workshops of the Maranello team. A comparison on different scales that gives us the opportunity to confirm “on paper” what the time results have shown so far in this start of the 2024 Formula 1 championship. Without further ado, let’s examine Scuderia Ferrari’s performance starting from the 2023 season, and then compare the results obtained by the Prancing Horse with the Red Bull benchmark.
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Ferrari SF-24: the car has maintained performance in qualifying and narrowed the gap in the race
The first data we take into consideration is related to the kilometric gap. We refer to the ratio between the ideal gap from pole position in qualifying and the kilometers of the track. We examined the last Grand Prix of 2023 compared to the first two of the current season. We specify that the gaps do not necessarily reflect the final standings, as we are talking about the ideal delta, obtained precisely by calculating each driver’s lap as the sum of the best sectors.
In the last ten races of the previous Formula 1 championship, Red Bull was the fastest car on the push lap for six times. In the remaining three World Championship events, however, the SF-23 car was the benchmark in this aspect. If we observe Ferrari’s trend line, in fact, concerning the outright lap, we will notice that within the transition between the 2023 and 2024 F1 seasons, the red car has maintained the same level of competitiveness.
Throughout the past championship, the Italian car showed excellent potential on the single-lap pace, and in the last races, the trend has even improved. We can say that at the moment, the Italian team has managed to get closer to Red Bull in terms of race pace, without losing performance on the outright lap. This was a goal set by Ferrari team principal Frederic Vasseur for the development work during the winter and the engineers of the Maranello team fully achieved it.
In 2023, Red Bull suffered a series of problems in Singapore that limited the RB19’s very high potential, which allowed the Maranello team to take advantage and secure the only non-Red Bull win of the season with Carlos Sainz. However, overall, it is clear that the RB19 proved to be fastest car even in the push lap, an aspect on which the Austrian team began to work strongly since the 2022 Formula 1 season, improving tire warm-up to be able to hit the optimal working window at its best.
In the second telemetry data analysis, we focus on quantifying the performance delta between the two seasons in question. The RB20 car is the current benchmark and has a minimal gap from pole position. A gap of 0.006 seconds on a generic a five kilometer track would correspond to 0.03 seconds at the finish line. In this sense, Ferrari is further approaching the best performance. By making a further calculation on a generic five kilometer track, the red car has gone from just over two-tenths of a gap at the finish line to only one.
Therefore, we can argue that the Ferrari SF-24 single-seater, at least for the moment, has been able to halve the gap in qualifying phases when compared to the value of the past Formula 1 season. On the contrary, Mercedes, with the W15 car, managed to increase this value in a few months. Currently, in fact, the black and gray car designed in the workshops of Brackley loses about one tenth per kilometer. This is why, at the finish line, it shows an average gap of five tenths to the front runners.
Source: Alessandro Arcari and Niccoló Arnerich for FUnoanalisitecnica
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