Following the difficult start to the 2023 Formula 1 championship, Scuderia Ferrari is looking for answers as to why its SF-23 challenger has lost so much ground to Red Bull as compared to the gap seen in the previous season, when the Italian side was much closer to its rivals, especially before it was forced to limit the power of the engine due to reliability issues.
Based on some recent reports from the Italian media, which have also been confirmed by RacingNews365’s technical expert Paolo Filisetti, Ferrari is evaluating the possibility of developing their Formula 1 car based on some concepts adopted by the Red Bull RB19. While the sidepod design cannot be changed in a short period of time, there some interesting changes in the rear wing area that the Maranello team could attempt to replicate.
Formula 1 history shows that simply copying the ideas of a rival teams most of the times doesn’t lead to the same results. Blindly copying other people’s technical solutions and not making a detailed analysis of the integration options with one’s own project is a risk not worth taking. However, focusing on understanding the basics of a rival’s concept, especially one like Red Bull who is clearly superior to everyone else in 2023, can lead to successfully using some prerogatives of a different project on your own single-seater and there is of course nothing wrong with that.
Ferrari team principal Frederic Vasseur openly admitted after the disappointing performance in the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix last week: “When we return to Maranello, I will tell the engineers that we must not make fun of each other, we have a problem and we must change the situation”. These statements clearly do not allow convenient interpretations of reality when it comes to the pace and performance of the Italian side’s 2023 Formula 1 car.
The SF-23 challenger has shown it can almost match the Red Bull RB19 car in terms of qualifying pace, while during the race Ferrari can only work with the soft and medium compounds. Even on these tyres Ferrari cannot challenge Red Bull, but can keep up within 2-3 tenths. However, the SF-23 is not able to get the harder tyres to work as expected. Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz’s stint on hard tyres at the Jeddah Corniche circuit clearly illustrated an overall lack of grip, with the SF-23 transforming itself between qualifying and the race despite using the same set-up and running in similar track conditions.
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Several technical analyses have pointed to a lack of downforce, maybe it would have been more accurate to talk about its not ideal distribution, but the feeling one got from different behaviour of the car on Sunday (with a high fuel load) as compared to Saturday is that the pace difference cannot be explained just by aerodynamics. It may be a combination of aerodynamics and vehicle dynamics, which means suspension. Their main goal is to keep the set-up of the single-seater as constant as possible, mainly when it comes to having to manage different ride heights and therefore make the lower aerodynamics more efficient.
A key strength of Red Bull and Aston Martin in 2023 is the front suspension, that is marked by a high anti-dive effect, which on the SF-23 car is minimal. Making a change to replicate the rivals solution is not possible in the short term, taking into consideration the huge modifications that have to be made to the chassis. However, some less complex changes, yet not simple at all, can still be applied to the rear suspension, where the intervention would still be important but less radical.
Let’s not forget how four years ago Mercedes focused a lot of its developed work on the rear suspension in the second half of the championship, up to the point of using an additional budget of about thirty million euros for the development process. Despite the fact that now teams have to deal with the budget cap limitations, Ferrari may find itself in a position to take quick action given the poor performance in the start of the season.
As a result, it looks like the Maranello technicians are thoroughly evaluating what changes to be made to the rear suspension of the SF-23 car, with a clear focus on the different position of the pick up points of the upper wishbone. More precisely, the updates will have the goal of maximizing the ‘anti-squat’ effect, i.e. anti-bulging of the rear, with the movement of the rear arm to the base of the support that holds the vertical pylon of the rear wing.
Such an update to the rear wing would by a change in the direction of the Red Bull RB19 concept: the Austrian side has designed a car with the rear arm in a single piece. This offers the possibility to have, even with soft settings, a great response from the suspension to crushing of the rear axle during acceleration and in longitudinal load transfers between the front and rear end.
The geometry of the suspension would therefore change slightly, mostly affecting its level of dynamic response. This means that there could be two key benefits for Ferrari: firstly, the mechanical grip at low speeds would improve given the possibility of using a softer set-up as compared to the current one. In addition this, the change would also allow for a minimum ride height, a significant factor for the new generation of Formula 1 cars, that would lead to more downforce generated by the floor.
In theory, it would therefore be possible for the Maranello team to finally show on track those positive features seen so far only on the simulator, which provided encouraging data for Ferrari during the winter simulation sessions ahead of the 2023 Formula One season, before things started to look bad in winter testing at the Bahrain International Circuit.
It is clear that these are complex changes and cannot be finalized in just a few days, but taking into consideration the cancellation of the Chinese Grand Prix, Scuderia Ferrari will have a three-week break following the Australian Grand Prix, providing the ideal opportunity to make a decision in terms of time and resources necessary for the implementation. This means that a new and improved version of the SF-23 rear suspension may be introduced for the Imola Grand Prix.
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