Just a week after the eventful Belgian GP, Scuderia Ferrari moves to the Zandvoort circuit for the Dutch Grand Prix, Round 13 of the 2021 FIA Formula One World Championship. This circuit will be new for the teams so it should help to make things somewaht more eqaul.
As we head to the Zandvoort circuit, the fight for third place continues between the Scuderia Ferrari and McLaren. The Maranello team will attempt to regain third place after losing four points to its main rival due to Daniel Ricciardo’s fourth place in the Belgian Grand Prix, with half points awarded after the rain-soaked Spa-Francorchamps event last weekend. It looks likely that the weather will also be in stark contrast to last race with dry conditions expected for most of the weekend.
Despite the fact that there was no relevant data relating to the Spa race, the Belgian GP was a small setback for the Italian side. A weekend during which the the SF21 car did not look capable at any time to challenge behind Mercedes and Red Bull, constantly encountering understeer problems and difficulties in activating the front compounds. The team seemed to have lost their way.
Certainly the variable of weather conditions during the practice sessions on Friday and Saturday did not help. But none of the changes made to the car in terms of set-up seemed to be able to satisfy the drivers. The use of a sub-optimal set-up has in fact produced a bad qualifying session. In fact, Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz were not able to go beyond Q2. Nonetheless, thanks to the penalty served by Bottas, Norris’s crash in qualifying and the mistake of Sergio Perez during the pre-race formation lap, the Ferrari drivers scored a few points after the “farce” Grand Prix that lasted 2 laps.
As for the Dutch Grand Prix, the behavior shown by Ferrari and McLaren in the first part of the championship makes us think of a SF21 car with a slight advantage. On the other hand, the SF21 has always performed well on medium-high downforce tracks where the impact of the power unit is not a determining factor. An element that will guarantee the Maranello technicians a decidedly wider set-up window, as the engine’s horsepower deficit will not require extreme tuning.
Nonetheless, the particular layout of Zandvoort requires an aerodynamic compromise that is anything but easy to make. Ferrari, therefore, will have to work on the basic set-up “built” in the simulator to maximize the set-up which, if right, will allow the Italian car to unleash its full potential. The choice on hybrid mapping is important. Only the long straight that leads to the finish line will allow the horses produced by the motor-generators to be “spread” more evenly. Factor that will help the Red to hide the gaps relating to the efficiency of the Italian Power Unit.
Furthermore, as always, a strong focus will be placed on tire management. Pirelli will bring their hardest range of tyre compounds, a combination which we last saw in Silverstone and Barcelona this season. If the track remains cool then it may be a challenge to get these compounds working properly, but this may only serve to level the playing field further.
The presence of corners in rapid succession, combined with the banking present in turns 3 and 14, will subject the compounds to considerable stress. In Zandvoort, activating the tyres should be quite simple and the drivers’ task will be to keep them from getting out of the correct operating window. Overheating at the rear, in fact, would create an unnecessary slippery behaviour which, in addition to increasing the degradation of the compounds, would negatively affect the overall lap time.
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