The Singapore Grand Prix was far from flattering for Ferrari’s current form. On the tight streets of Marina Bay, the Scuderia struggled significantly with brake management. Charles Leclerc was forced to use lift and coast from the early stages, while Lewis Hamilton faced a complete crisis in the closing laps, even cutting corners just to make it to the finish line with an SF-25 that had almost lost braking power altogether.
Two weeks later, Ferrari acknowledged that a mistake had been made in its simulator predictions. The admission came in Austin through the team’s Head of Track Engineering, Matteo Togninalli, who confirmed that the brake issue could still be a concern heading into the Mexican Grand Prix.
Togninalli’s explanation
“In Singapore, we knowingly approached qualifying and the race with a car that was right on the limit,” Matteo Togninalli explained. “We knew that on Sunday we would have to manage the brakes carefully. Because of the situation and the level of management we adopted, we ended up running out of brakes in the last four laps of the race. We were a bit too aggressive, and that was a mistake.”
The Ferrari engineer admitted that the team’s tools did not anticipate the issue correctly. “Our simulations weren’t able to predict how aggressive this setup would be. We need to improve our tools to better forecast what will happen,” he added.
Matteo Togninalli went on to describe how Ferrari is accelerating its development process. “We’re speeding up the improvement of our simulation tools. Now we have a good amount of data to work with, because most of the time you learn from critical situations. When everything goes smoothly, it’s hard to learn — you learn when you’re on the limit. In Mexico, we’ll need to be a bit more cautious.”
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