During the weekends in Austria and Great Britain, there was a lot of talk about the updates introduced in Spain by the Maranello team, but unfortunately, to date, despite the many positive words from Vasseur, they still do not work on the SF24.
The situation after Austria
After the Austrian race, the team principal of the historic Italian team defended the updates and the work conducted in the factory, saying that the updates were good. With the new solutions, the car could count on an overall increase in aerodynamic downforce. According to the manager, the difficulties came from the track, which, due to insufficient understanding of the new package, could not maximize its potential.
The situation after Great Britain
Then came Silverstone, and after spending the entire Friday conducting comparative tests, Ferrari decided to shelve the most recent developments, opting for the solutions introduced in Imola. If you’re wondering why the Prancing Horse team ended up as the fourth force of the weekend (earning 11 points and almost falling to fifth place since Aston Martin scored 10), this is the crucial point.
A delay of 3-4 months
Going back to the Emilia Romagna GP, the SF-24 took a two-month downgrade compared to the others. This delay will also include the time that technicians will need to get to the root of the problem, not only in terms of identification but also in the design and realization of new components.
According to what Sainz wrote in the past few hours, the team has already identified the cause of the failure of the latest update. Now, however, a solution must be found. Meanwhile, those with clear ideas are ahead and are studying how to progress further. Therefore, we can estimate a comfortable delay of 3-4 months.
The updates work (if they work) where they shouldn’t
Recently, many things have been said, and none have been an accurate picture of reality. What we can say is that Ferrari is still not able to properly exploit ground effect cars; otherwise, they would have fought for the podium alongside Mercedes, McLaren, and Red Bull yesterday at Silverstone. This track represents an important testing ground with its fast corners in this aspect.
Moreover, Vasseur told us after the race that the most recent updates were discarded in Great Britain because they caused the car to bounce more (porpoising/bouncing), which was harmful to performance and would have worked better in Hungary.
If you think this is reassuring, it is not. First of all, we need to wait for Budapest to confirm this, but even if it turns out to be true, it would not be good news. The SF-24 likes slow corners, as we saw in Monte Carlo, but we cannot always wait for a circuit full of low-speed corners to be competitive. If two ‘Venturi tunnels’ were made on the floor of the cars, it was to make them very fast in high-speed corners, not to be agile in tight ones.
Therefore, if the latest updates work in Hungary, it would not be a good sign for Ferrari, because it would indicate that the package works exactly where it shouldn’t.
