Ferrari Technical Director Enrico Cardile says reaching a development ceiling last term prompted the team to pursue an overhaul for its 2024 Formula 1 car.
Having returned to race-winning ways upon F1’s switch to ground effect aero in 2022, Ferrari opted to retain faith in the inwash ‘bathtub’ sidepods at the start of last season.
However, the Italian marque encountered trouble with a capricious SF-23 challenger, which proved to be an unpredictable machine susceptible to changing conditions.
Ferrari then abandoned that solution to converge upon the popular downwash solution, but the side remained restricted by the architecture of its launch-spec chassis.
The Maranello-based squad has since committed to a “complete revamp” with its successor with the aim of granting both its drivers a more benign and compliant base.
Cardile has detailed how Ferrari came to decide upon revising its design scheme for 2024 and predicts that it won’t be alone in electing to construct wholesale changes.
“Everything is down to the aero development and the ability to manage the flows in a better way in the most profitable way,” he told media including Motorsport Week.
“So with the last past concept of the car, we reached a kind of [limit] on what we could do with the car, and from there it has been crucial for unlocking this performance and meaning, at the end of the day, on the floor behaviour was crucial. To revamp completely the architecture of the car and going in a direction this year will be pretty common across the grid.”
Amid concerns over porpoising, the FIA passed through a rule change for 2023 that raised the cars’ floors by 15 millimetres and also the underfloor diffuser throat by 10mm.
However, Cardile has clarified that Ferrari’s sudden slump in performance under these regulations was down to struggling to extract sizeable performance from its old concept.
“No, I don’t think that the regulation change affected what we did,” he answered when asked whether the subtle tweak to last year’s cars derailed Ferrari’s initial car philosophy.
“To start with, the 2022 car concept was a good one but at the end of the day in terms of how far we could have gone with this concept. I mean, it was less than with the new concepts.
“So at the end of the day, it was just a matter of the peak of performance, you can reach with the other concept.
“So 2022 was a good car, providing good performance, very stable but when we started to add that downforce to the car.
“We strongly believe that the new concepts will allow us to go more far than the previous one.”
Charles Leclerc admitted that he was pleased with the behaviour of the SF-24 on the simulator and described it as “definitely a step forward” on its mercurial predecessor.
Cardile is optimistic that Ferrari’s strength on Sprint weekends when there was limited practice time last year demonstrates that its virtual tools provide an accurate reflection.
“The simulator is a key aspect; with simulator it means the whole environment of the simulation. So it’s key to have a good simulator, it is even more important that we have the right modelling or the car in the simulator and the right modelling of the physics of the car,” he explained.
“Last year being very good on using the simulator the car was responding in a robust manner in a way that what we saw the simulator or what has been always what we found also on track. So from there, last year it was strength on preparing the Sprint races.
“Regarding the feeling of this year’s car, the feeling on our sim are good, the car progressed but at the end of the day in this business, this is all you know, it’s relevant, but not too much since we will not see where we are compared to the other.
“So, we are really looking forward to start this season, to check the real competitiveness of the car because we are missing this data.
