Scuderia Ferrari left Zandvoort with a more positive performance than expected, although the gap from Lando Norris’s McLaren MCL38 at the end of the Dutch Grand Prix was still significant, around 25 seconds, roughly the same as the SF-24 had at the beginning of the 2024 Formula 1 championship compared to the Red Bull RB20, which at that moment was the fastest car on the grid. The Woking car crushed the competition, but the Zandvoort glass can be considered half full for the Maranello team. Now Ferrari is preparing for the always eagerly awaited Italian Grand Prix at the Monza circuit in front of the Tifosi, a track where the SF-24 aims to be closer to the top. If Zandvoort was one of the worst circuits in terms of layout and track characteristics, Monza on paper can be considered more suited to the car designed by the now former technical director and Italian aerodynamicist Enrico Cardile. On the Italian track, the aerodynamic package will arrive, already announced in our preview of the Italian Grand Prix and now confirmed by Frederic Vasseur himself at the presentation of the event, with the clear goal of aiming to get the car back on the right development track after the problematic update introduced at the Circuit de Catalunya in Barcelona.
The period of negative downturn in performance that the SF-24 experienced, becoming on average the fourth force ahead of the summer break, is essentially due to the limitations that the update to the floor in Barcelona brought. It is undeniable that the Ferrari technicians had to deal with the unforeseen technical issues on a car that, until that moment, had overall performed well. The floor evolution at the beginning of summer was supposed to mitigate the weaknesses with which the SF-24 was designed, especially in terms of lap performance and load in medium / high-speed corners. Trying to give more downforce to improve in the corners essentially put the mechanics – heavily criticized for being too “traditional” for these venturi effect cars – into crisis, unable to handle the extra load.
At the Monza circuit, the SF-24 will also have a good part of the updates that were planned for the upcoming Asian races, in a race against time that has yielded positive results. The most important novelty this weekend for the Italian Grand Prix is the first true “evolved” floor after the Spanish version. The update that was approved for the Hungaroring round in Hungary was nothing more than a quick and more “makeshift” fix to the problems, with a floor modeled exclusively through a virtual model in Computational Fluid Dynamics, based on the specification introduced even earlier at Imola. The Italian track, despite being a fairly specific track, will be an important testing ground to see if the simulations match what we will see on the track. In short, it will be necessary to assess whether Maranello has done its homework well, considering all the current mechanical platform’s limitations, which is close to a more radical change in view of the 2025 Formula 1 championship, which we had already talked about.
It is therefore worth pointing out a change of course: Ferrari does not want to repeat the mistake made with Enrico Cardile of introducing large packages too close together, as explained by F1 journalists Rosario Giuliana and Giuliano Duchessa for formu1a.uno.
The aerodynamic package with which the SF-24 presents itself at the home Grand Prix is, in fact, an attempt to group together in a single package all the main updates that were planned for the second part of the year, although other elements of lesser overall importance should still arrive until the Mexican Grand Prix. Ferrari’s technical direction, a role still occupied by Frederic Vasseur for a little while longer, wanted to change the approach somewhat compared to the first part of the 2024 Formula 1 season; with Enrico Cardile in command, the decision to introduce two significant aerodynamic packages (in the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix and in the Spanish Grand Prix) within a month then created difficulties for the Maranello technicians in fully understanding the SF-24 car.
Ferrari has therefore decided to adopt a more “McLaren-like” approach, preferring to concentrate all the updates in a single macro-update, which will be the last of such great importance for the season. The results that the Maranello team expects from the new Monza package are to put the SF-24 back in a window capable of having stable downforce at medium and high speeds, an aspect in which the SF-24 is particularly lacking compared to McLaren and Red Bull. The problem over the last month and a half has not been so much finding extra downforce but obtaining it in such a way that it does not make the platform too sensitive to triggering bouncing. The aerodynamic update that the wind tunnel is undergoing also stems from the need to have tools that can refine the study of the vehicle’s aerodynamic behavior.
The Monza package does not only include the floor: the new low-drag rear wing is also new.
The floor will be the main component that will be declared upon arrival at Monza and will guarantee most of the additional performance. In what we could almost define as an “all-in” from Ferrari in terms of updates, there will be a “multi-updated” SF-24. There will be some aerodynamic innovations in addition to the new floor, although considered of lesser importance in terms of performance.
The “shopping list” that Ferrari presents for the Italian Grand Prix will also include a new low-drag rear wing, which will be declared and paired with a single-profile beam wing. In last year’s Italian GP, the Maranello team had “recycled” the previous year’s wing, mounting the same specification seen in 2022 on the F1-75 directly onto the following year’s SF-23. A reuse that will not happen this year. The new low-drag wing, equipped with greater efficiency, will maintain the now-classic “pointed ears” in the connection between the endplate and wing profiles and will most likely also be used in Las Vegas.
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