Ferrari explain why their change of car concept only went so far · RaceFans

Ferrari was the only team besides Red Bull to win a race last year and took five pole positions over the final nine races of the season.

So while other front-running teams like Mercedes decided early on they needed to totally overhaul their car design to get on terms with Red Bull, Ferrari wanted to retain their SF-23’s strengths while addressing its weaknesses.

The SF-24, presented on Tuesday, aims to do exactly that. It is not a huge departure from last year’s car but Ferrari believe they have worked out how they can extract more potential from it and address its extreme sensitivity to changes in conditions, something they made progress with over the final races of 2023, which allowed its qualities to shine.

The team made a strong start to the current F1 rules era at the beginning of 2022. Its F1-75 won the first two races of that season and propelled Charles Leclerc into championship contention.

Chassis technical director Enrico Cardile does not believe the team’s subsequent lapse in form at the beginning of last season was due to off-season changes to the technical regulations which led them to make changes to its floor. He says they simply exhausted the development options with their original philosophy and needed a change of direction.

“I don’t think that the regulation changes affected what we did,” he told media including RaceFans. “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 was less than with the new concept.

“It was just a matter of how high is the peak of performance you can reach with that concept or with the other concept. So the 2022 car was a good car providing good performance, very stable, but when we started to add downforce to the car we strongly believed that the new concept will allow us to go more far than the previous one.”

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The team “reached a kind of asymptote on what we could do with the car” under the previous design, said Cardile, and it “was crucial to revamp the completely the architecture of the car” in order to improve the performance of its floor. Significantly, he also claimed the direction Ferrari has gone in “will be pretty common across the grid” this year.

Teams’ choices of suspension configuration have been a particular point of interest this year, as…