Ferrari working on new simulator in parallel with 2020 car, before budget cap becomes active. Ferrari to equip the simulation department with new tools.

Before the budget cap will become active, Scuderia Ferrari has decided to equip their simulation department with new tools, a new simulator that is being developed in parallel with the 2020 car to make an important qualitative leap forward, according to Motorsport Italy.

The “spider” is therfore retiring. Ferrari is adapting and for the start of the 2020 Formula 1 season, the Maranello team should also be equipped with a simulation system that is more modern and in line with current times. The concrete cube in the heart of the Reparto Corse in Maranello can be reused, because perhaps not everyone knows that a three-storey structure was needed to contain the current “spider” of which there is a Dallara copy.

Before the budget cap limits the spending chapters in 2021, the Scuderia will be equipped with new tools to improve its simulation department, so that the correlation between the on-track data and the factory is increasingly realistic. The investments will be worth millions of euros which and represent the strategic aspects in the development of the venue: any changes approved to the CFD or wind tunnel must be transferred to the simulator before it is used on the driver’s car for the race weekend.

And all the sensations that the drivers feel on the track must be reproducible in the laboratory, in an increasingly complex correlation that requires super-computers to manage the monstrous mass of data that is processed in real time. The perception is to get out of reality and to immerse in a virtual world that links the present to the future: the “spider” of Moog has played its part during these years, but now it takes more to win the challenge in Formula 1.

Regulations tend to further limit wind tunnel research by shifting work to the CFD. And the simulator becomes, before the car on the track, the instrument that incorporates all the changes giving the test drivers (Pascal Wehrlein, Brendon Hartley, Antonio Fuoco and Davide Rigon) the sensations that the drivers will feel on track. Ferrari for the simulator therfore leaves the aero-space era and enters the digital one. Today the drivers have to climb a ladder on the platform in the center of the room, just as if they were in a spaceship: in reality it is an aluminum cage that houses the cockpit of a single-seater and the devices for visualization of images and sound diffusion.

The other top teams like Mercedes and Red Bull have had solutions of this type for a long time, but now Ferrari is trying to make an important leap in quality by surpassing competitors with a system that should be a new state of the art.