The week after the two disqualifications is a dramatic, emergency week, where Ferrari shuts itself off. Technical meetings and calls from high-ranking officials, irritated with Frederic Vasseur, follow one another, while the problem of Charles Leclerc’s underweight is downplayed as a judgment error, however serious, while the worn-out skid on Lewis Hamilton’s car opens a real crisis scenario. That half millimeter of excessive wear, which led to the exclusion of the Sprint winner from the classification, is the litmus test of the difficulty Ferrari is having in getting the aerodynamics to work.
Ferrari, ground effect to not miss
The car is fast and has a good race pace, but to express it, it has to run very low, and in the case of the Chinese GP, too low. Because if you want to be safe and raise the car (we’re talking about two millimeters, which may seem like a small amount, but on the chronometers, they cost at least three tenths per lap), you lose the ground effect, and at the same time, the entire car body becomes like a wing exposed to the wind (imagine the DRS fully lowered or slightly raised). And a wing car on the straight no longer flows. Raising the car was precisely what caused the performance loss between Friday and Saturday in Australia, and between Saturday and Sunday in China.
Concern in Maranello about the bumps at Suzuka
Now, heavy questions weigh on Ferrari. If the simulators signaled an SF-25 worthy of a championship and the tracks tell a different story, is there truly a correlation between the two, or are the data obtained in Maranello misleading? If a smooth billiard-like track surface, such as the new one on the Chinese track, wore out the skid too much, how much will the Red cars need to be raised in two Sundays to withstand the bumps at Suzuka? Moreover, and most importantly: can the problem be solved with a new floor, or is it structural and related to the entire project, specifically to the fully revised suspension? A real puzzle, amplified by the ill-advised candidacy for the two titles flaunted in the winter and, today, complicated by performance anxiety. Ferrari provides no further explanations, aside from the contrite lines released after the two disqualifications: all the remaining comments, from the drivers as well as team principal Fred Vasseur, have remained those of the immediate post-race, where the fifth and sixth places are mentioned, which later faded away.
Now Ferrari turns to Loic Serra
Now, it’s up to Loic Serra: here, his ability will be tested. Not as technical director, but in the role he is truly an expert in and which, from 2019 to 2023, saw him working profitably at Mercedes: that of development chief. The French engineer was the man to whom the German star entrusted its car every year, whether it was better or worse, to make sure it performed as best as possible. So, it’s up to him. After the Bahrain tests (February 26-28), in light of the lack of race pace, Ferrari immediately took action, starting to prepare a new floor that would ensure the ground effect and improve the car’s performance. The plan was to debut it in the Bahrain GP (April 13), which is two races away; but now, given the emergency, will they try to bring it forward to the next Japanese GP? Or, faced with the risk of complicating the technical puzzle, will the line of caution prevail? After the double embarrassment, the hours in Maranello are turbulent.
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