Vanja #66 wrote: ↑14 Feb 2024, 22:41
For all the complaints of the launch car being simple, it's now clear why not going fully committed with a single type of inlet solution was the right thing to do. Every other Top 5 car features a different inlet philosophy and Alpine has a peculiar arch tunnel in the undercut, so now Ferrari can gather info and chose the best way for their future development direction.
On top of that, their sidepods can likely be shrink wrapped a bit. Both of those developments are completely minor, but they left themselves a lot of room to switch development direction if they want to, not sure RB and AMR will be able to do that. And again, the floor is where the magic happens, so they can now focus on developing it for more performance instead of drivability only.
Starting simple to then commit themselves to a certain direction seems like a reasonable thing to do considering it’s their first car with this new concept/philosophy.
Cardile said that they first want to make sure that what they’re seeing on track matches their data and then start putting developments on the car. You can say that this is a different approach from Ferrari compared to last years.
I’m thinking if they might do something like Mercedes or Alpine with the sidepod inlets because of the already existing S-duct. This would give them a better opportunity shrinking the sidepods than with a letterbox design. Is it even possible for Ferrari to have such inlets like RBR and AMR with the cooling concept they have? Maybe I’m totally wrong, though.