ScuderiaLeo wrote: ↑04 Jul 2024, 00:31
It surely can't get worse than this, so I'm hopeful.
We are still fighting at the front in terms of general laptime competitiveness. Of course things can be worse than this. It is very possible to actually be MUCH worse than this. Being disappointed with lack of progress compared to others is understandable, but it's good to have some perspective here with regards to where Ferrari are at now.
Nothing about 2026 is guaranteed at all. We could be anywhere from dominant to fighting for 8th in the constructor's. It's going to be a fairly big reset. And personally, a lot of the good feelings I was having about our technical situation have diminished somewhat lately.
As for Ferrari getting the bouncing sorted out, the sim is obviously not helping in this regard. Which isn't surprising as advanced as they are nowadays, they dont actually have super sophisticated aero modeling going on, and especially a complicated combination of aerodynamics and suspension dynamics is too much for any sim to accurately simulate. So it's gonna have to be done at the track, and is probably a good reason to disregard practice results moreso than usual, cuz this really is a paramount issue.
I'm not super hopeful. Mercedes spent way too long trying to chase on-paper downforce gains until learning that consistent and usable downforce is simply the way to go. And I worry about how incredibly fine tuned the setup could need to be to solve this issue and whether or not such a narrow setup will have other drawbacks. If it's even solvable at all...
EDIT: Also, whatever happened to the supposed 20% of the upgrade that was to come this weekend?