Ferrari didn't have PU issues, but could not get the front end to work

Formula One expert Mark Hughes, who currently is a Grand Prix editor for Motor Sport magazine and has had several F1-related books published, comments on the first race of the 2019 Formula One season and the first impressions after Scuderia Ferrari’s poor performance in the Australian Grand Prix:

“Around a low grip, bumpy track very different to Barcelona, the SF90 simply wasn’t working. “It was not balanced, it struggled with the tyres and none of the different set-ups we tried worked,” surmised Mattia Binotto. It was noticeable that it was running a lot of front wing angle and GPS analysis confirmed that most of the time loss was in Turns One, Three and 13 – i.e. the slow, big steering-lock corners leading onto straights. Meaning it was slow onto the straights and at the end of them. Even with all its front wing angle used up, it still had a front-end grip shortfall.

This and some tactical complications saw Sebastian Vettel overtaken for the final podium place by the Red Bull-Honda of Max Verstappen.

Déjà vu all over again as Hamilton blitzed Albert Park qualifying by a margin over Ferrari that had negative implications for the competitiveness of the season to come. But although the Mercedes advantage on Saturday was very real (Hamilton and Bottas were around 0.7sec clear of Vettel’s third-fastest Ferrari), it may not be indicative.

Using the front of the incredibly densely-packed six-team midfield as a reference, Ferrari’s advantage over it (around 0.7sec) was much as it had appeared through Barcelona testing – which suggested it was Mercedes which had suddenly found a lot of speed, not Ferrari losing it all. That’s the first point (though it has a caveat, which we’ll come to in a moment). The second is that in the hotter conditions of Friday (when Mercedes was also fastest) the Mercedes’ advantage over the midfield was normal but the Ferrari had dropped back into it. So although Mercedes was comfortably fastest both days, there were very big competitive swings going on from one day to the next and neither team could readily understand why. Vettel was saying that, like last year, the Ferrari wasn’t giving him the messages he liked around this tricky windy, bumpy track and he didn’t have the confidence he did with it in testing. But he accepted that it was much better on Saturday than Friday.

The caveat was that the 0.7sec advantage Vettel had over Romain Grosjean’s Class B-leading Haas would have been just 0.4sec had Grosjean’s car not suffered an exhaust-related power loss on his best lap. So it wasn’t all Mercedes finding more. Ferrari had lost something since Barcelona. Just not enough to explain Mercedes’ dominance here.

So what was behind these swings? Well, for one the Ferrari was lacking in front-end grip. Although its straightline speeds were well down too, this was a just a function of how much slower it was onto the straights (GPS-derived power overlays suggested a negligible difference between Mercedes and Ferrari). No amount of set-up change was changing that and the suggestion was that the Ferrari’s front wing philosophy (with the elements cut away at the outboard ends ahead of the front tyre to help outwash the airflow around the tyre) under these new regulations can leave you with not enough range of downforce settings to compensate for a low-grip, slow corner-dominated track. That’s the working theory of a few aerodynamicists. Those cars performing notably better than at Barcelona – i.e. Mercedes and Haas – feature the opposite front wing approach to Ferrari’s, with full depth elements ahead of the tyres.

“We think it’s probably tyres,” said an unnamed Red Bull man. “They are so stiff that it can be difficult to get them working properly around this place. But if you get them in the window suddenly there’s lots of extra performance. Looks like Ferrari have got caught out by it, same as us.”

Maybe the front wing limitation was exacerbating the tyre situation. Because even if Mercedes had been sandbagging, as the popular reaction insists, that doesn’t explain why Ferrari’s Melbourne form Friday to Saturday was so volatile. And if Ferrari (and everyone except Mercedes) wasn’t getting the tyres working properly around the dusty, low grip track, then we probably aren’t seeing the picture we will around a more conventional track.”