Scuderia Ferrari is generating a lot of heated discussion following the official reveal of the SF-23 challenger: the Maranello technicians did not hide the solutions which they decided to introduce on the new car already from the first lap at Fiorano during the presentation that took place on its home track, in a scenario that allowed us fans to enjoy a genuine, authentic car launch.
There wasn’t a livery on display, there wasn’t a rendering maybe disguised with Photoshop to hide those details that you don’t want to show your rivals until next week’s collective testing session at the Bahrain International Circuit, but the whole car was there. True, very true in all its beauty.
For the Tifosi, sinuous and captivating shapes can become seductive, but fans expect a competitive Ferrari capable of challenging Max Verstappen’s Red Bull as well as Lewis Hamilton and George Russell’s Mercedes. After all, the team principal, Fred Vasseur, was clear from the first statements: “The Scuderia will aim for the two world titles, because Maranello lacks nothing to be successful”.
And, then, it was the technical aspect that took over: Ferrari didn’t hide, instead deciding to take to the track without the mask. The front wing, redesigned as the shorter nose, immediately led to discussions for those five small carbon slots that link the last flap to the third element. Maranello has re-proposed the solution that the FIA had rejected for Mercedes in last year’s Mexican Grand Prix.
It was enough to remove a little word from the 2023 technical regulation, “mainly”, to make perfectly legal a concept that Mercedes wanted to pass off as a series of structural supports, while they clearly had an aerodynamic function.
But the SF-23 also exhibited another novelty, a technical innovation that is destined to make engineers, observers and analysts discuss. David Sanchez, the creative Head of Vehicle Concept, has identified areas of the SF-23 where it should be possible to seek performance and the team of aerodynamicists led by Diego Tondi, Head of Aero Development, have invented an S-duct.
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Not under the nose as we had seen on the Ferrari in 2008: on the SF-23 the S-duct ingeniously connects the open vertical slot at the root of the chassis, just below the mouth of the radiators, with a duct that vents the flow from a two-stage periscope blowing on the hollowed out part of the sidepod. Conjectures immediately arose to understand what this system could be used for: some spoke of the vertical intake as a tool aimed at cooling the control units and those parts that until last year could find a place in the cockpit, while now the cockpit must have been freed of any accessories for safety reasons.
Others have interpreted the “periscope” as an additional cooling outlet, given that Ferrari has smaller radiators than those fitted to the F1-75.
In reality, the narrow air vent that can be observed on the sides of the cockpit does not directly extract the heat from the sidepods: if anything, with the cool flow that arrives from under the vents, it is possible to speed up the suction of the hot air from the gills, allowing better fluid dynamics inside the sidepods and, therefore, the slits can be smaller to the advantage of aerodynamic efficiency.
And, having discovered how the system was called by the Maranello technicians, all doubts were removed: inside the Ferrari Racing Department we are talking about “bypass duct”, so from now on we adopt this name identifying an innovative solution which is destined to generate a lot of talk in the next few days.
The FIA, for example, has not yet wanted to express an opinion on the idea of Ferrari’s staff, because the legality checks have not been conducted yet and there will be in-depth checks in Bahrain.
Scuderia Ferrari has certainly informed the International Federation of its intention to introduce the “bypass duct”, complying with a technical regulation which since last year requires compliance with volumes and not measures, so the verification of certain ideas becomes complicated if one does not have a CAD program.
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