As anticipated ahead of the start of the Bahrain pre-season testing session, Scudera Ferrari brought a new floor specification to the track today. Not in the morning with Charles Leclerc, when the Maranello team wanted to correlate some set-up variants with the same specification of car that took to the track on the last day of testing in Barcelona, but in the afternoon session, when the Spaniard Carlos Sainz was behind the wheel.
The new floor had a clear cut in the rear, a modification made to give more stability to the flow at high speeds and further reduce the porpoising phenomenon.
The F1-75 car, as reported by Italian journalists Piergiuseppe Donadoni and Giuliano Duchessa for Formu1a.uno, underwent greater oversteer with the new floor specification, obviously a ‘counter’ to compensate, but with the advantage of being able to use softer set-ups, with a better compromise, which bring greater advantages in the slow corners In fact, today we saw an F1-75 on the track glued to the ground in the fast turns (one of the lowest cars, if not the lowest) but still quite high in the slow ones.
With the new generation of cars, those who go fast in the medium and low speed corners will be able to make the difference. This is because in the fast ones, the ‘ground effect’ aerodynamic concept will help everyone to go fast or in any case the differences in performance will be reduced compared to other types of corners.
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Ferrari worked a lot during the winter on this aspect, to be able to make its F1-75 work with rather soft set-ups, although the ground effect in the fast corners prefers very stiff set-ups. The porpoising effect, which was not noticed in Maranello with the usual development tools (wind tunnel, computational fluid dynamics and simulator), had removed some of the confidence, but Ferrari can be pleased with the updates brought to the track so far.
Finally, the new floor specification has maintained all the previous innovations, namely the tie rod in the final part of the floor and the cut created where the Venturi tunnels have their minimum section at high speeds; all new features are useful for limiting aerodynamic blocking below the floor and for removing the trigger of porposing. These are already good signs.
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