Ferrari SF-24 EVO car designed from agility of adaptive approach

Scuderia Ferrari has the answer ready for Red Bull in Formula 1. While waiting to discover the effectiveness of the work done on the SF-24 EVO and to understand the novelties that will be proposed by the Austrian team at the upcoming Emilia Romagna Grand Prix at the Imola circuit, the Maranello team conducted the shakedown last Friday of what rightly is considered a 2.0 version of the Italian car for the 2024 Formula 1 championship. Several areas of the car have undergone aerodynamic restructuring to extract more potential from the red machine. It’s worth mentioning that in the era of ground-effect cars, much of the performance is guaranteed by the vehicle’s floor geometry.

This is a major component on which we still have to wait until the next F1 Grand Prix to learn more. Ferrari engineers have made a tremendous effort to bring to the track, as soon as possible, a solution that would follow the Red Bull idea conceived by the brilliant mind of Adrian Newey. We are talking about the “shark inlet” in order to optimize the airflow under the car and increase the outwash effect. The RB20 was presented in mid-February, but it was only from the first races that we began to understand the real geometry of the microscopic air intakes in the sidepods, hidden under a sort of tray cleverly camouflaged by the images released at that moment.

As usual, the historic Italian team started designing the development of the SF-24 even before the Formula 1 championship began, studying this solution even before seeing it on the Red Bull car, thanks to the information gathered from former Milton Keynes technicians who switched to the red side in winter. After verifying the correlation between wind tunnel and Computational Fluid Dynamics, work began. Studying solutions is always important, as it allows replication of the setup through reverse engineering. The Ferrari Racing Division has evidently tested the integration of interesting concepts from the competition through an interesting design approach.

F1, Ferrari’s Adaptive Approach

An F1 season is a race of developments that requires constant adaptation and improvement to increase the performance of the car. Before the season, teams develop their cars for competition through design and simulations, hampered by limited on-track testing. The teams arrive at the first race of the Formula 1 championship with the fruits of pre-season development work. But this is by no means the finished product. The cars are sort of prototypes, and during the F1 campaign, they continuously evolve through mechanical and aerodynamic changes.

A simple question arises during the development of an F1 car: “How much will the assumed changes allow the car to be faster?” The teams have several departments within their respective factories that must cooperate to create the final product. To ensure effective cross-functional collaboration, the leaders of these units meet several times a day, in quick stand-up meetings, to discuss progress and needs. F1 teams are a benchmark in terms of organizational clarity, enabling speed and agility.

In this regard, team principal Frederic Vasseur‘s work with Ferrari has been phenomenal. Already during the previous campaign, despite the SF-23 being a project with certain significant structural flaws, the team managed to produce a significant development by compressing the realization time by two weeks, bringing the “B” version of the car to the track at the F1 Grand Prix in Spain. The new SF-24 EVO version also represents the result of an agile (adaptive) design approach, to which the team is becoming accustomed to operating.

Incorporating ideas from the competition into one’s own car development concept is by no means a simple exercise. There is firstly the risk of invalidating the efficiency of the update package in the simulator, studied immediately after acquiring the first on-track data. Furthermore, it requires compression of the initially set timeline, as the design diverges from the initially assumed one. Ferrari, therefore, has decided to change its approach in this regard, starting to work in F1 according to the following paradigms:

Improve information flow through regular interactive collective meetings, delegate decision-making power and autonomy to individuals and teams, provide frontline collaborators with the information they need to make the right decisions continuously, improve collaboration between F1 working groups by creating effective cross-functional teams, building solid communication channels between them, maintain lean processes and simple rules, trust collaborators and free them from unnecessary rules designed only to prevent some extreme cases, optimize your product development lifecycle by reducing learning time, let data drive decisions, create a blame-free culture where technicians are encouraged to experiment and most importantly adopt a systemic thinking perspective when learning from failure.

Based on the above principles, which are not only organizational best practices, the French executive, team principal of the historic Scuderia Ferrari, has revolutionized sports management and, thanks to his organizational and leadership skills shown in this abundant year at the helm of the red team, has managed to maximize the team’s effectiveness in terms of performance and product implementation. Thanks to this and the clever readiness of technicians from Red Bull, the SF-24 is the first car that, in a very short time, shows an aggressive solution from a competitor.