Ferrari has explained how correlating the wind tunnel for the team’s 2025 Formula 1 car was behind its decision to sample a revised floor at the Las Vegas Grand Prix.
The Italian marque had insisted that no updates would be arriving to boost the team’s hopes in the Constructors’ Championship, where it is 36 points behind McLaren.
However, Ferrari debuted a modified floor on F1’s third visit to the United States this season that was run on Carlos Sainz’s SF-24 across the opening practice session.
But the floor was removed prior to FP2 and won’t be seen again this weekend as Ferrari Senior Performance Engineer Jock Clear revealed it was an experimental part.
Clear divulged that Ferrari’s FP1 test revolved around the desire to ensure that components are behaving as expected as preparations build towards its 2025 machine.
“It’s with a view to correlating the tunnel,” Clear addressed to select media including Motorsport Week in Las Vegas.
“Now obviously that has implications for ’25, because that’s the tool you’re developing everything on, but it’s very much a correlation process.”
Clear denied that Ferrari’s choice to complete such an investigation implied that there are possible internal concerns about the team’s wind tunnel to track correlation.
“I think we’ve been quite open in effectively being public about the fact that we brought this floor in,” he continued.
“But I think you’ll probably find teams do this all the time.
“Obviously a floor’s a big part, and actually you have to make a commitment, because it’s an expensive part as well.
“So it’s not the kind of thing you’re going to do every week, but there are bits on the car that are developments and correlating things that are on the car every week.
“You know, little sensors and little fins on the front brake ducts and things like that.
“So the fact that we’ve obviously put some effort into bringing a floor here, it’s an important correlation, and we certainly think if it gives us the information we want, then yeah, it’s worth doing. That’s why we’re doing it.”
Ferrari explains choice to trial floor in Vegas
Clear also dismissed that electing to sample the change on a street track rather than a conventional circuit would restrict the data that Ferrari would be able to obtain.
“No, you could run this thing down the main straight of Monza and learn just as much,” he highlighted.
“You can’t go testing every week, so we’re going to run it down the main straight in Las Vegas.”
Ferrari engineers eager not to waste time
Ferrari’s rationale behind selecting Las Vegas over purpose-built venues in Qatar or Abu Dhabi came from the engineers’ wish not to spurn valuable development time.
“You’d have to come back to the machinations of what the tunnel development people decide they’re doing,” Clear explained.
“I think it’s just timing, honestly. If you say to the tunnel people, can you wait two weeks before we correlate that, they’re going to go, ‘no, we want it now’.
“So they probably decided they wanted this correlation two weeks ago, and telling them, ‘OK, you can have it in a month’ didn’t sound as good as ‘you can have it in two weeks’.
“So that’s what they asked us to do. Development has an x-axis, which is time, and development is constant.
“But how well you perform against the others depends on the x-axis, which is time. So we’re always going to be doing things as quickly as we can, basically.”
Ferrari rules out using floor again in 2024
Meanwhile, Clear also quashed the notion that Ferrari might be tempted to continue with the floor later in the weekend should Sainz provide a promising assessment.
“No, I would say we wouldn’t, because we would look at what he was doing with tyre temperatures that made him give him such a good feeling,” he responded.
“There’s no way what’s different on that floor is going to give him performance that he’ll feel, if you see what I mean.
“So if he does feel the car’s great, then he’s done a good job in warming the tyres up, probably.”
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