The Formula 1 2024 season marks a turning point for the Prancing Horse, which now boasts a car more competitive in races than in the qualifying sessions. Ferrari’s ‘race-oriented’ behaviour emerges at every Grand Prix and reflects the team’s approach, which now places more emphasis on Sunday during weekend preparations. This new design philosophy stems from past issues with tire degradation and the particularities of ground-effect aerodynamics in modern Formula 1.
Beyond the tires
It has been observed several times that the SF-24 was designed to be gentler on tires, extending their life during races at the expense of tire usage and fast activation during qualifying. This trait depends on multiple factors, such as load transfer onto the tires or the angles and deformations they work under. However, attention to tires wasn’t the only consideration in the design phase.
During the last Italian Grand Prix, Jock Clear, Ferrari’s Senior Performance Engineer, highlighted a peculiarity of modern Formula 1 cars: “These ground-effect cars are very sensitive to ride height. Each team has a different idea of where to make the car perform best. For this reason, moving from qualifying to the race, you see a slightly different hierarchy among the cars.” Under the old regulations, cars used to have a static ride height of over 100 mm, compared to the current cars’ 60 mm. This, combined with the power of the three-dimensional floors with Venturi channels, means that even a few millimeters of difference can significantly impact lower aerodynamics.
Thus, it’s necessary to optimize the floor design to perform best within a precise ride height range, which must be supported by the suspension characteristics. This ultimately defines the car’s ‘concept,’ meaning the way the car operates and the conditions under which it delivers performance. In Ferrari‘s case, they chose to develop their car for the ride heights typically experienced on Sundays. During a race, the car runs slower and is therefore less compressed against the ground compared to qualifying, despite carrying more fuel.
The drivers are grateful
The peculiarity of ground-effect aerodynamics and the extreme sensitivity to ride height make it difficult to identify which types of corners favor each car. Jock Clear continues: “Five years ago, you could generally say that someone was more competitive in high-speed corners and less in slow ones. However, this is no longer very valid because in some corners, a car might appear more or less competitive depending on the fuel load or whether it’s qualifying or a race. It’s very difficult to have a clear trend of what others are doing.”
In the ground-effect Formula 1 era, finding a good balance between qualifying and race performance is harder than before. Depending on how much or how little fuel is onboard, the floor reacts and approaches the ground differently. This not only impacts aerodynamics and the forces transmitted to the wheels but also the driver’s confidence in the car. A driver more comfortable with the car in race conditions makes fewer steering corrections, avoiding sliding and overheating the tires. All these factors pushed Ferrari to change their approach from the past, no longer developing a qualifying queen but rather a true ‘race car.’
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