Scuderia Ferrari has certainly collected less than what it could have achieved with a “normal” race in the 2021 Emilia Romagna Grand Prix. Without the red flag resulting from the accident between Valtteri Bottas and George Russell, Lewis Hamilton and Lando Norris would not have had the chance to finish ahead of Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari. The whole team is aware of this, as Mattia Binotto admitted at the end of the race: “The whole team regrets. We are all convinced that we could have achieved a better position today. We did well in qualifying and in the race, both in dry and wet conditions, on a track different than that of Bahrain. We have some weaknesses, but we know where to work” – the Ferrari boss said.
Ferrari had sacrificed a bit of performance in qualifying to load the car more given the expected wet weather at the start of the Imola race. On a wet track, Charles managed to defend himself quite well. Despite never being able to keep up with Hamilton and Verstappen, the Monegasque nevertheless managed to build a rather important gap against Norris and before the race was stopped, Charles had an advantage of more than 20s.
The increased load helped the drivers in the first phase of the race but it was certainly a big handicap when the track went dry. Along with the indecision on the rolling start, where Verstappen’s small mistake surprises the Monegasque, for the SF21 there was undoubtedly not enough straight line speed which made it impossible to defend from Norris.
Furthermore, although Charles had the pace to try to recover the position on the British, the drag of the SF21 did not allow it. The same goes for Hamilton. After defending very well up to that moment, with 9 laps until the end Charles made a small error at Mineral Waters. Losing the Drs on Lando, the Ferrari driver was easily passed by the 7-time world champion.
But the step made by the Ferrari drivers is not exclusively due to the increase in power of the Italian Power Unit. The new O56 / B engine allows technicians to use structures more suited to the various types of track. This situation was not possible in 2020. The Italian single-seaters were in fact forced to run very flat, sacrificing balance and cornering speed to compensate for the performance deficit on the straight. However the improvement also came in those other areas of the car. The regulatory change also contributed to this, reducing the load generated by the floor and the diffuser.
In recent seasons, mainly from 2019 onwards, after the changes in the rules of the front wing, Ferrari has never managed to extract the maximum potential from the floor and from the diffuser. This was something that teams like Mercedes and Red Bull did better. This year’s limitations penalized teams like Mercedes and less Ferrari as, for the reasons described above, it was not possible to find the maximum load from the floor and from the diffuser. Thanks to the new aerodynamic rules, removing the rear downforce, the Italian car immediately found itself more balanced, with an SF21 that is only distantly related to the “infamous” SF1000.
Nonetheless, to take a further step forward it will be necessary to find more load on the front axle since, from the analysis of the on boards of Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz, the SF21 car still seems to suffer from understeer compared to Red Bull and Mercedes. With greater load on the front, it will be possible to work to increase that on the rear and this will allow them to take a further step closer to the top teams.
Although it is still a bit early to draw definitive conclusions, analyzing the distance to Mercedes we can see a big difference. As we can see in the chart at the top here, Ferrari’s gap to the German team has reduced from more than two tenths / kilometer to “only” 0,061 per kilometer. This means a gain of about 8 tenths per lap on a 5-kilometer track.
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