Despite the fact that Scuderia Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc was running a new, lower-downforce rear wing specification on the F1-75 car variant at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve in Montreal than his Maranello team mate Carlos Sainz, this component was not just to help the Monegasque driver make as many overtaking moves as possible given his starting position (P19) as a result of the grid penalties for changing two power units.
In a recent article for the official Formula 1 website, technical contributors Mark Hughes and Giorgio Piola take a detailed look into the Italian side’s complex plan for the next part of the 2022 Formula One season. The wing used on the F1-75 car of Charles Leclerc’s car at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve will most likely become a main element at the majority of the tracks this season, after Ferrari will manufacture enough examples of it.
Mark Hughes believes that is is a completely different family of wing to the extreme low-downforce wing which could be seen at the Baku City Circuit in Azerbaijan two weeks ago. What Charles Leclerc used at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve is just a lower downforce/drag specification of the standard wing, without the Baku wing’s straight-edged mainplane and very small lower surface area.
In Canada, Ferrari was able bring just one example of the wing and the Maranello team Charles Leclerc was going to be the one to use it. If Ferrari had had enough time two produce two such elements for last weekend, it would likely have been on both F1-75 challengers in Montreal and maybe Carlos Sainz would have had a better chance to attempt an attack against Max Verstappen in the final laps of the Canadian Grand Prix.
The wing is Ferrari’s response to the pattern seen in the early-season events, as title-rivals Red Bull showed greater end-of-straight speed, especially in the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, where Charles Leclerc had no chance to defend against the top speed of Max Verstappen. With this new variant of the wing, Ferrari are ready to make a small sacrifice in terms of overall downforce to be able to gain more-than-proportional reduction in drag. It thus represents a more aero-efficient wing.
Ferrari engineer Claudio Albertini explained the background to the wing choices in Montreal. “With just one example, we could not risk it on Carlos’s car, because if it had been damaged in qualifying and replaced with a different spec wing, he would have needed to start in the pit lane. With Charles, because he was taking the PU penalty and starting at the back anyway, we were able to have a quieter, low-risk qualifying. It’s an average level of downforce, similar to that used in Australia or Miami, but working on the efficiency to have lower drag… It’s true that sometimes you realise when you see a rival where you can improve and you can see that [with] top speed, there was room to improve.” – the Ferrari Head of Track Operations explained.
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“The new wing works in conjunction with a revised lower beam wing, with a narrower upper flap. The new wing has a straight-edged flap rather than the upswept standard one. The mainplane retains the outboard upsweep of the standard wing but the central section does not sweep down as dramatically. This creates a smaller area of lower surface and therefore a lower pressure difference between the upper and lower surfaces, as the airflow travelling over the lower surface does not have as far to go to meet up with the air travelling over the upper surface and so isn’t forced to flow as fast. This reduces downforce (bad) and drag (good).” – Mark Hughes pointed out.
Scuderia Ferrari’s goal is clearly to improve the efficiency and as a result gain more lap time from the drag reduction than is lost from the downforce reduction (yet this may vary depending on the track characteristics, but the Maranello team are confident they have achieved that with this updated wing).
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