Ferrari English senior performance engineer Jock Clear, who is also the director of the Ferrari Driver Academy, explained why the updates brought by the Maranello team’s technicians at the Circuit de Catalunya in Barcelona didn’t work.
Jock Clear’s comments
These are the engineer’s statements: “We are satisfied to have better correlated the bouncing phenomenon [with the updates at Monza, editor’s note] compared to Barcelona.” – the 60-year-old engineer explained.
“However, we are not happy that the bouncing compromised our updates during the season. The drivers found that the car has more downforce, but it’s difficult to drive when it bounces. Now we have more data, we have refined our simulation models. In the future, this will represent less and less of a problem,” Jock Clear concluded.
A big regret for the Maranello team, but there’s still hope
Scuderia Ferrari arrived at the Circuit de Catalunya-Barcelona for the Spanish Grand Prix with great enthusiasm, following the splendid race victory of Charles Leclerc on the streets of Monte Carlo in Monaco and a package of aerodynamic updates on the SF-24 single-seater, with the hope of being able to challenge its rivals on a different type of track as compared to Monaco.
However, the modifications made to the SF-24 car that weekend didn’t work as the Maranello team had imagined, given the impossibility of predicting the bouncing in simulations.
Now Ferrari, as stated by team principal Frédéric Vasseur, dreams of the Constructors’ Championship; but will they manage to win it? And above all, how would the season have gone if the aerodynamic updates introduced in Barcelona had worked? We will never know.
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