2025 Scuderia Ferrari F1 Team

[dialtone]

So what the floor upgrade they had in mind in the beginning of the season probably aimed at bringing even more DF but they had to toss that aside because the current and even the upgraded suspension can’t handle the load?

Wonder if the new floor produces less DF or they just moved it around?

Vanja please tell us how this works

As the article said the issue is the operating window.

When they designed the car they expected a peak downforce happening with a given load on suspension, and everything was tuned with that expectation in mind.

When they tested everything they saw a floor that stops performing completely even just 2mm higher and a suspension that couldn’t handle the load it was given.

The new floor is probably slightly less sensitive to height through the curve, probably less peak downforce but more and more usable downforce down the speed-height-DF curve.

The floor error is due to them not understanding (or maybe thry thought they could handle it anyway) that it was both aerodynamic and suspension related in 2024, and they thought they could just follow some design principles on diffuser shape (middle part entry of diffuser, forget the name at the moment (stern?), and floor edge in particular).

And the suspension is going through the same treatment, increase ability to operate at different stiffness and height levels while maintaining the same compliance in a smaller package.

Judging by this second article, Vasseur asked the team to be daring and try extreme setups, given leadership changes from last season I think we’re dealing with a youngish team there.

There is nothing deeply wrong here in my opinion. Renew Vasseur and move on, he’s done incredible for the pit crew performance, pit wall is at minimum on equal ground as the rest of the grid, car is full of different thinking compared to the rest of the grid and they pay one serious mistake after many leadership changes.

Just let them work in peace for a few seasons, tell the part of the team that just doesn’t like Vasseur that they can take the door, and the part that think that he’s not changed Ferrari enough to be patient, and just generally tell them they are professionals and not children, disagree and commit or change job, don’t be toxic, this isn’t high school.

[ScuderiaLeo]

There is nothing deeply wrong here in my opinion. Renew Vasseur and move on, he’s done incredible for the pit crew performance, pit wall is at minimum on equal ground as the rest of the grid, car is full of different thinking compared to the rest of the grid and they pay one serious mistake after many leadership changes.

Just let them work in peace for a few seasons, tell the part of the team that just doesn’t like Vasseur that they can take the door, and the part that think that he’s not changed Ferrari enough to be patient, and just generally tell them they are professionals and not children, disagree and commit or change job, don’t be toxic, this isn’t high school.

This is a part that so many forget.

Improving the car is a multi-year journey. No the car isn't where anyone wants it to be. But the strategy and on track performance has greatly improved under Vasseur compared to past TPs. These factors are important too, look at McLaren who threw away what should've been an easy win last season due to poor strategy (Monza) or some other teams with less reliable pit crews having less margin to pit than Ferrari does.

Not only that but if Binotto had stayed as TP Leclerc perhaps would've left, or at least I can confidently say he wouldn't be as trusting of the team which would cause a lot of issues with politics and strategy.

[DJ Downforce]

New floor is a positive. Hopefully it delivers what the team expects.

Wonder if there's any chance of a last big push to bring the suspension changes to Austria too. It's only one week before, but would be an extra race weekend of understanding the package..

[f1316]

There is nothing deeply wrong here in my opinion. Renew Vasseur and move on, he’s done incredible for the pit crew performance, pit wall is at minimum on equal ground as the rest of the grid, car is full of different thinking compared to the rest of the grid and they pay one serious mistake after many leadership changes.

Just let them work in peace for a few seasons, tell the part of the team that just doesn’t like Vasseur that they can take the door, and the part that think that he’s not changed Ferrari enough to be patient, and just generally tell them they are professionals and not children, disagree and commit or change job, don’t be toxic, this isn’t high school.

This is a part that so many forget.

Improving the car is a multi-year journey. No the car isn't where anyone wants it to be. But the strategy and on track performance has greatly improved under Vasseur compared to past TPs. These factors are important too, look at McLaren who threw away what should've been an easy win last season due to poor strategy (Monza) or some other teams with less reliable pit crews having less margin to pit than Ferrari does.

Not only that but if Binotto had stayed as TP Leclerc perhaps would've left, or at least I can confidently say he wouldn't be as trusting of the team which would cause a lot of issues with politics and strategy.

Yeah, I really agree with dialtone’s original post. There’s much ado about nothing here.

There’s no need to massively change personnel or build a British factory. We’re not seeing a team who can’t produce a winning car or is out of ideas; what we’re seeing is occasional miscalibration of technical tools (simulator, rolling road etc) that are causing some missteps (the base SF-23, last year’s Spain floor, this year’s suspension etc.). These are technical problems, not people problems. It’s a shame they haven’t fully understood them all yet but, as Wolf once said: it’s science not magic. Needs to be solved methodically and iteratively.

[deadhead]

So what the floor upgrade they had in mind in the beginning of the season probably aimed at bringing even more DF but they had to toss that aside because the current and even the upgraded suspension can’t handle the load?

Wonder if the new floor produces less DF or they just moved it around?

Vanja please tell us how this works

As the article said the issue is the operating window.

When they designed the car they expected a peak downforce happening with a given load on suspension, and everything was tuned with that expectation in mind.

When they tested everything they saw a floor that stops performing completely even just 2mm higher and a suspension that couldn’t handle the load it was given.

The new floor is probably slightly less sensitive to height through the curve, probably less peak downforce but more and more usable downforce down the speed-height-DF curve.

The floor error is due to them not understanding (or maybe thry thought they could handle it anyway) that it was both aerodynamic and suspension related in 2024, and they thought they could just follow some design principles on diffuser shape (middle part entry of diffuser, forget the name at the moment (stern?), and floor edge in particular).

And the suspension is going through the same treatment, increase ability to operate at different stiffness and height levels while maintaining the same compliance in a smaller package.

Judging by this second article, Vasseur asked the team to be daring and try extreme setups, given leadership changes from last season I think we’re dealing with a youngish team there.

There is nothing deeply wrong here in my opinion. Renew Vasseur and move on, he’s done incredible for the pit crew performance, pit wall is at minimum on equal ground as the rest of the grid, car is full of different thinking compared to the rest of the grid and they pay one serious mistake after many leadership changes.

Just let them work in peace for a few seasons, tell the part of the team that just doesn’t like Vasseur that they can take the door, and the part that think that he’s not changed Ferrari enough to be patient, and just generally tell them they are professionals and not children, disagree and commit or change job, don’t be toxic, this isn’t high school.

Thank you for the insight!

Logically if they had to change the floor despite the new suspension it probably means that they couldn’t fix the problem with the suspension alone.

Sounds like some sort of compromise and we will likely find out at Spa .. maybe Silverstone

[Space-heat]

New floor in Austria. The AR brief's use of "conservative" for the new technical direction that Tondi and Serra are supposed to have defined does not fill me with expectations, but at least something is coming to the car.
https://autoracer.it/ferrari-sviluppi-s ... ornamenti/

The logical thing here would be that this new floor is meant to work with the new rear suspension but they are not bringing them together for whatever reason. Maybe it’s easier to see what the new floor is doing with the old mechanics first

To be fair to Nunges, he was the one who touted a floor arriving before the rear suspension, although he was a few races off.

It is hard to understand; perhaps with the slow corners in Austria being short, they might feel that they can survive with a narrow window. If I were guessing, I would assume the rear suspension is not ready. Otherwise, they would bring it as it has to be the biggest performance gain available. The whole AR article is unfortunate as the briefing from the team seems to have the underlying message that we can't make the intended SF25 car work, so we have to compromise performance.

I know we all know any championship aspirations are long gone, but I had hoped Charles would get a front-running car to the end of the season, but the messaging seems to meter that. Hopefully, they are trying to downplay, but the yearly cycle of switching to the next year is exhausting. The SF23 really was the point where Ferrari lost this rule set. I know the TD039, but they were just too slow to adopt the better concept.

[venkyhere]

Reading all this, one is prompted to circle back to the same old Q that we all asked after the Australian GP :

Did the aero team and chassis team only communicate through 'file transfer' or did they actually have human-to-human meetings in a room ? Because after race9, and after all the text and videos in the internet 'analyzing' the problem with the SF25 have reached feverish pitch, the 'problem' seems to be the same 'basic' one that was suspected by so many of us after the race1 -- why this disconnect between what the aero guy expected/implemented and the chassis guy implemented/expected ?

[miket]

I personally think that they realized the problem very early on - but the solution is not that easy - so it was not like they sat on their hands doing nothing.
There is also quite some lead time - from designing a component - to producing it - so after the first round of components - all production was stop(these were already in the pipeline from preseason testing or before) - as it is just a wast of time and budget - designing improvements for a car that might change and render those components flawed or useless.
So once the issue came up - they had to find the area of the issue - be it suspension or aerodynamics - the issue is why the simulation or design software did not correctly predict the issue or is the simulation flawed - you have to find the root cause before you can fix anything, you cant just jump in and design something new, as that might be flawed as well.
Only once you have figured that out - only then can you start working on the issue, and once again you have the huge lead time to final production.
But hey - I'm sure there is plenty guys sitting behind a laptop that spotted the problem, eyed a solution within 10 minutes, and given a roll of ductape could have fixed it already at race 2.

[venkyhere]

I personally think that they realized the problem very early on - but the solution is not that easy - so it was not like they sat on their hands doing nothing.
There is also quite some lead time - from designing a component - to producing it - so after the first round of components - all production was stop(these were already in the pipeline from preseason testing or before) - as it is just a wast of time and budget - designing improvements for a car that might change and render those components flawed or useless.
So once the issue came up - they had to find the area of the issue - be it suspension or aerodynamics - the issue is why the simulation or design software did not correctly predict the issue or is the simulation flawed - you have to find the root cause before you can fix anything, you cant just jump in and design something new, as that might be flawed as well.
Only once you have figured that out - only then can you start working on the issue, and once again you have the huge lead time to final production.
But hey - I'm sure there is plenty guys sitting behind a laptop that spotted the problem, eyed a solution within 10 minutes, and given a roll of ductape could have fixed it already at race 2.

Ferrari must have realized the problem in Bahrain testing itself, even before race1. To reiterate, the question I was asking was not about whether they ignored the problem once they 'hit' it (so they haven't 'sat on their hands' and neither did I claim them to) ; it was about - why did such a glaring plank strike regulation breach issue (a basic one, that is) escape their simulation/emulation tools when they married the aero map with the chassis map ? Many teams face 'correlation issues' but they are all related to 'fine tuning' the setup w.r.t car balance, not something as basic as 'plank wear'. To provide an analogy, it's like other teams are having trouble with their calculations because they truncated their excel sheet cells to have only 3 decimal places instead of 4 ; while Ferrari are having trouble because they truncated their excel sheet cells to have no decimal places at all. It's too basic.

There is no need to be so sarcastic with your reply. The quagmire that SF25 is in, points to an error/omission that took place way back in the second half of 2024 itself. Otherwise, we all know how they must have, immediately after Bahrain testing, stopped the production pipeline prescribed to the factory.

[miket]

The sarcasm wasn't aimed at you - but more at the general direction that all forums and media is going in, crusifying the TP and team but like in any competition at this level - margin for error is extremely low, and even the smallest of mistakes has big consequence.
So without knowing exactly what is wrong - EVERTHING is just speculation.
As for the plank wear breach - I would think, its was a simulation that told them what the ride height would do as fuel burned off and what downforce the package produce with the movement from the suspension plus the surface of the track, and at that stage they were still focusing on extracting the max out of the car - they felt they could trust what the simulation and calculations told them - and were caught out. Subsequintly, they did not breach it again, and I think they are erroring on the safe side untill they can solve the real issue, if that is even possible on this car - time will tell.