Ferrari SF-25 setup problems: is the simulator giving false data?. Ferrari faces a crucial test at Suzuka as concerns grow over ride height issues and simulator accuracy.

Suzuka is a Key Weekend
It’s not a last chance, but what happened in Australia and China makes the Japanese Grand Prix a crucial exam for Ferrari, coming off a double disqualification in Shanghai after a race where they finished fifth and sixth from the fourth-fastest car on the grid. This result had been emerging in Melbourne as well, before the final chaos that could have put the SF-25s on the podium (instead, Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton, waiting for an extra lap, fell back to the edge of the points zone).

At Suzuka, it will be crucial for Ferrari to determine whether the ride height remains an unsolvable puzzle, or if what has happened so far can simply be written off as “growing pains” of a project that is 95% new compared to the SF-24. Today’s edition of the Italian newspaper Il Corriere dello Sport openly discusses a potential “simulator issue” if Ferrari finds itself in trouble again in Japan: “Ferrari won’t bring any major developments because there is still too much to understand about the SF-25’s ride height, and introducing changes now could just complicate things further – the article by Fulvio Solms states – We also need to understand whether the Maranello simulator is lying, given that it hadn’t predicted the setup problems and lack of ground effect observed in Australia and manifested in China.”

Thus, the data correlation issue comes back into focus, a key aspect in F1 that has recently caught several teams off guard, including Red Bull. Ferrari will have a new floor in Bahrain regarding updates, but this was a development already planned after the Bahrain tests and not a countermeasure prompted by the issues encountered in the first two races of the season. No major update package is expected, as first the nature of the SF-25 must be understood before adding more unknowns to an already complex equation.