“If we don’t try the pre-France floor, we will try at least some elements of that floor.” – In this way, Mattia Mattia Binotto previewed Scuderia Ferrari’s plan for the first day of action at the Monza circuit, announcing a program of comparative tests in the free practice sessions for the Italian Grand Prix with the goal of identifying the origin of the problems that have affected the F1-75 cars in recent races, starting with the Budapest stage.
And the first free practice session for the Italian Grand Prix at Monza confirmed the comments of the Ferrari Team Principal, with the F1-75 taking to the track with the floor used in the second quarter of the championship from Barcelona to Austria.
Both Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc ran in the opening minutes of the session with the last specification of the floor which made its debut at the Paul Ricard circuit. However, the images collected during FP1 confirm what could already be guessed from the pictures of the Ferrari pits, with the mechanics intent on working on the underbody of the F1-75. In fact, the penultimate version of the floor was reinstalled on the car, recognizable by the entrance section of the Venturi channel at a constant height and not with a sharp jump as in the last iteration, according to formulapassion.it
The latest development of the floor was introduced at the French Grand Prix with the dual objective of increasing the aerodynamic load generated and reducing the tendency to porpoising, the now well-known aerodynamic bouncing. However, the balance of the car was affected and at Paul Ricard it was partially obscured by the pole position and the first part of the race for Charles Leclerc, who even at that time confirmed he was not perfectly at ease with the F1-75:
“The development we brought to France, practically the latest from an aerodynamic point of view, was done to improve the bouncing and for us it should have been a significant step forward to reduce it,” explains Mattia Binotto. “Inevitably it has also led to secondary behaviors, however desired, but which today are limiting us in something”.
It is difficult to understand from the outside what exactly are the secondary effects mentioned by the Team Principal, since the same technicians of the Italian side still struggle to understand the dynamics of what happened. However, listening to the statements of the Ferrari staff, it is still possible to try to guess in general terms what happened to the F1-75.
After the difficult race in Zandvoort, Mattia Binotto had underlined some difficulties in finding the balance in the passage from the fast and slow corners. All this leads us to think of an excessive deviation of the center of gravity, ideally the center of gravity of the mechanical forces acting on the car, and that of pressure, reference for the distribution of the aerodynamic forces that emerge as speed increases. Considering how the center of pressure moves with varying speed, it would not be surprising if on the Ferrari its position and the way in which it migrates had been affected by the updates introduced in France.
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For the Maranello team it would thus have become more difficult to find a right balance and an aerodynamic behavior that is no longer in tune with the mechanical one, with the balance constantly varying according to the speed.
Mattia Binotto himself underlined that there is no certainty at the moment if these problems depend on the updates themselves, becoming in that case a symptom of an imperfect correlation with the design tools, or rather their interpretation, understood as the adaptation of mechanical adjustments, suspension and set-up. The test with the pre-France floor on Friday in Monza also does not necessarily imply a willingness on the part of the team to retrace its steps, but the pure intention of gathering information on the origin of the recent problems in order to then decide on possible solutions. Regardless of everything, however, the attention of the team on the influence of the new floor is the proof that the limits of F1-75 are not the result of the technical directive introduced in August starting with the Belgian GP.
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