ferrarifire wrote: ↑30 Jul 2023, 18:24
Ferrari not able to generate the enough heat on the tire has been an issue ..this is one of the reason Ferrari is having inconsistent performance
This tyre temperature situation has been up and down over the season. In Bahrain they had a too aggressive setup and degraded a bit more than others. In Jeddah they over-corrected and suffered with slow pace on hard tyres a lot. In Australia the car had a good pace and no degradation for Sainz, in Baku Leclerc did his thing and managed to put the car on podium. Miami was very weird for Leclerc, it seems like the team didn't repair it properly since it wasn't behaving on Sunday as well as before. Monaco wasn't as good as it could have been since Leclerc got a grid drop because of Xavi so what should have been an easy podium turned out to be a lovely P6.
In Barcelona they changed the aero a lot and in the first race they didn't use it fully due to improper setup. After the Barcelona 2024-tyre-test they found a few things so they started managing the tyre temperature and degradation a lot better. The race in Canada was very good, Austria as well. For me it's still unclear what has changed with new Pirelli tyres since Silverstone, but that race was done way too conservative regarding tyre strategy. Hungary to me looked like they had big problems with getting the tyres to work well (whether it was too much or too little temperature I don't know). Today, the car was actually quite good on tyres and basically very little behind Perez until Leclerc had to start saving the fuel and lost 8-9s in the final 5 laps. Maybe Hungary was a bad setup choice with insufficient practice time and washed-up track, who knows...
Overall, the problem with suspension isn't getting the tyres in the right window since they managed to achieve that as early as Australia I'd say, but rather getting the floor consistently in the right ride height window in the race. The new floor in Austria was a step back from launch-spec floor in terms of tunnel throat height, so they may have given up some raw downforce in search for something else. However, the car still loses the most between Q and Race, which remains a consistent feature. If there were some doubts after 4-5 races, after all the floor and other aero changes we now know for sure the suspension was not designed in a way that allows the car to run as low to the ground as RB19 and some other cars at the start of the race and this remains the biggest issue. Due to this, you have uneven downforce levels between the start and the end of the race and this makes managing the tyres that much harder - which is exactly what caused them trouble in Bahrain and Jeddah in two very different ways.
Edit: I did forget to mention one point about tyres. When there are weekends or just races with mixed conditions or even dry but with big changes in track temperature, Ferrari has been having problems even last year. This speaks of a lack of depth of operating the tyres. So even when they nail the setup for an expected track temp, the car suffers from variations more than other cars. In truth, this is less of an issue for the overall performance in a race than the ride height operating window, since these situations are not present all the time.