Scuderia Ferrari will continue with the development of its single-pillar rear wing following the clear problems encountered by the Maranello team first in the winter official pre-season testing session at the Bahrain International Circuit and later during the first free practice session for the Sakhir event.
The new design, that has the goal of cleaning up the airflow to the wing, was used for the first time on Day 3 of pre-season testing in Bahrain, but suffered a DRS problem and had to be removed by the Ferrari mechanics. A few days later, in the first free practice session for the Bahrain Grand Prix, Ferrari once again mounted the new rear wing, but TV footage showed the component oscillating in dramatic fashion, which meant the Italian side had to again remove it and replace it with a standard twin-pylon wing for the rest of the Sakhir weekend.
English senior performance engineer Jock Clear, who currently works as Charles Leclerc’s driver coach, downplayed the problems and explained that this situation is just a reflection of the lack of track testing available to teams given the current rules and regulation:.
“I think the double-pylon obviously is a carryover from last year, tried and trusted. And the single didn’t really come into development until later in the year, in fact very late in the year, maybe the last month of development. So it’s fairly young. It’s a development that’s just a step forward on the rear wing really. Obviously getting down to a mono pillar just cleans up the flow to the bottom of the main plane. So it’s just providing a bit more juice. But like everything, we need to get it on the car and check it all out. And we did that at the test, and we did it again here, and it’s just an ongoing development really. So nothing amazing about it. But it’s probably something that we want to pursue, what we’ve seen so far is positive. So it’ll probably appear again.” – the veteran Ferrari engineer explained.
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Jock Clear also wanted to point out that it was not possible to evaluate how much work will be needed for the Maranello team to be able to think of using the new rear wing during a qualifying session or the race, but confirmed the Italian side will continue to focus on the development of the component:
“Difficult to say, I would have to refer to my composite colleagues and aero specialists to know exactly,” he noted. “But it’s one of those things where actually it’s very difficult to get that sort of mode of vibration replicated in the wind tunnel. You can get the loads out of it, but all the stiffnesses actually have to be reflected in the real size. So that’s why we’ve had to go to the car, we put it on the car. And of course, nowadays, you get very little testing time. So we have to use these Fridays to test some bits. So as I say, it’s just a normal development. And we’ve learned a lot from it. And we’ve got the videos, we’ve got the sensors on it, it will tell us how much movement there is now. It’s obviously improved from last week to this week. And we’ll go back to the factory and improve it again. And once we’re comfortable with it, it’ll appear.” – the 59-year-old English senior performance engineer added.
Scuderia Ferrari also encountered a different problem in the qualifying session for the Bahrain Grand Prix, when the SF-23 of Charles Leclerc lost parts from a front wheel arch. Ferrari was able to fix it in time for the Monegasque driver to end qualifying in third place and later strengthened during the night, ahead of Sunday’s race in Sakhir:
“I think again it’s a reflection of maybe the less testing pre-season here. It’s not given us the opportunity to really rattle everything to bits over what was I think 7500kms last year. And yeah, it’s unfortunate, and it certainly unnerves the driver a bit, as you probably heard on the radio. So we certainly don’t enjoy that sort of thing in qualifying. It was a very small part on the front wheel arch, effectively. And we put a new one on, and we reinforced them overnight. Again, we don’t enjoy those sorts of things in qualifying, we could do without it. But it’s just part of the first race of the year and getting the teething problems out of the car.” – Jock Clear concluded.
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