2025 Scuderia Ferrari F1 Team

[deadhead]

Lewis notebook is a bigger joke than Ted's

[Luscion]

Bullet points from the article written by Duchessa about next year's car and ferrari's plans

https://www.corriere.it/sport/formula-1 ... 4xlk.shtml


SF-25 didn't work and it's limitations were too deep to get it back on track

Even though the new suspension didnt work, it helped them understand where the correlation was lost and helped Serra to not make the wrong choices for 2026

Ferrari abandoning the SF-25 early allowed them to try all possible mechanical combinations, allowing them to design a suspension scheme with double push-rod with an unprecedented design

The technical office had established with Vasseur that they couldn't give up the possible 2 tenths per month, perhaps 3, of development on the 678 against the half tenth per month of this season.

Ferrari is focusing most of its main attention on the chassis and on some drivability solutions given the new regs are a surprise for everyone

Whether 2026 will be the year of the spotlight or yet another reset will be understood after 6-7 races

There's maximum confidentiality at the top, only Vasseur, Serra, Tondi and Gualtieri (the head of the engine department) know the integration data between chassis, power unit and simulations.

The SF-26(?) unlike the current car, will have a continuous development plan for each single race, directed by Frank Sanchez.

Ferrari will announce the launch date of the 2026 car soon

[ScuderiaLeo]

Leclerc was in today's press conference. Some interview notes I've seen/watched:

• Everyone is expecting McLaren to be very strong here.
• He doesn't think Ferrari will be competitive for a podium, let alone him being relevant to the title race, but he'll do his best to maximize the result no matter what it is.
• He maintains he's satisfied with his own overall job this season and they've performed well as a team despite the bad weekends here and there. The last weekend was an outlier so he hopes they can end on something better.
• He can trace back their current car's flaws to mid-2022 when they started to lose control of their development compared to Red Bull.
• He thinks Norris will win the WDC because the points gap is too large. Though for some time he thought it'd be Verstappen.
• [Answering whether he would let one of the contenders by] He won't race them any less hard because of it; he doesn't care personally who wins so he won't move aside for any.
• They know what wrong with Qatar, but they don't know for sure what they could've done better.
• He thinks hate commenters, like the ones Antonelli was subject to, should be punished more harshly.
• He doesn't have any specific advice to give Hamilton, they work together frequently already so Hamilton knows everything Leclerc knows.

[hsg]

Lewis pure performance last 4 years was age problem(he simply loose speed) or venturi floor cars?
What do you think? Next year flat floor is come back so we will get answer..

[r85]

Lewis pure performance last 4 years was age problem(he simply loose speed) or venturi floor cars?
What do you think? Next year flat floor is come back so we will get answer..

I think a younger Lewis would have adapted better to these cars. He loses a lot of his laptime mid-corner right after his usual hard braking, perhaps it's not what these cars like.

[Badger]

Lewis pure performance last 4 years was age problem(he simply loose speed) or venturi floor cars?
What do you think? Next year flat floor is come back so we will get answer..

There's no compelling argument for why he would be bad with venturi cars, it's just an excuse. These cars aren't that dissimilar to the previous gen, they have similar amounts of downforce, cornering performance, braking performance etc. The driving style change is small enough that for a guy of Hamilton's talent it should have been a relatively easy transition, not something you struggle with for 4 years. The reasons for his decline are simple, natural decline because of age and stronger teammates.

As for next season I would actually be more worried about how his driving style adapts than current gen. His signature is late braking. With the new gen cars late braking is basically not going to be a thing because of all the harvesting towards the end of the straight. The deceleration distance will be elongated and the performance is going to come from whoever can carry the most speed through the corner and get back on power first. It won't be last of the late brakers.

[hsg]

There's no compelling argument for why he would be bad with venturi cars, it's just an excuse. The reasons for his decline are simple, natural decline because of age and stronger teammates.

I agree, next year will be no difference than last few years. When he admitted it to himself, he will retire at the end of 2026.

[venkyhere]

Lewis pure performance last 4 years was age problem(he simply loose speed) or venturi floor cars?
What do you think? Next year flat floor is come back so we will get answer..

I think a younger Lewis would have adapted better to these cars. He loses a lot of his laptime mid-corner right after his usual hard braking, perhaps it's not what these cars like.

There's no compelling argument for why he would be bad with venturi cars, it's just an excuse. These cars aren't that dissimilar to the previous gen, they have similar amounts of downforce, cornering performance, braking performance etc. The driving style change is small enough that for a guy of Hamilton's talent it should have been a relatively easy transition, not something you struggle with for 4 years. The reasons for his decline are simple, natural decline because of age and stronger teammates.

As for next season I would actually be more worried about how his driving style adapts than current gen. His signature is late braking. With the new gen cars late braking is basically not going to be a thing because of all the harvesting towards the end of the straight. The deceleration distance will be elongated and the performance is going to come from whoever can carry the most speed through the corner and get back on power first. It won't be last of the late brakers.

I think LH has always struggled with ground effect cars. That's because of his inability to alter his natural driving style. I had posted this a few weeks ago :

While I don't want to comment on his involvement(or lack of) in 'car development' (we are reminded of the various 'I am the man for experiements' in 2022 and 2023 at Mercedes) ; one thing I can say with confidence - he hasn't adapted his driving to suit a ground effect (GE) car, where combined entry (steering + super-aggressive braking) into a corner disturbs the car so much, that it loses balance.
That's because of the shape of the underfloor 'low pressure slice of air' :
-- in the 'normal flat floor era', this was a wedge shaped high speed air, which produced suction that was less sensitive to the dynamic shape changes to the wedge (which comes mainly from hard braking under 'yaw')
-- int the GE venturi floor era, this is a small volume 'snake body shaped' tunnel with ultra-fast moving air, which produces suction ; thus making it super-sensitive to dynamic shape/orientation changes in corner entry. A big clue that this is the case, is the amount of anti-dive/anti-squat present in the GE designs, compared to the previous era.

Decades of muscle memory and 'instinct' (or just plain old stubborness) that makes him repeat the same 'hard late braking with not-little steering angle' on corner entry, is a technical deficiency from a driving standpoint. I am sure he is aware of this already. Hamilton will be happiest to see the back of 4 years of GE cars, and will be eager for the flat floor 2026 car.

[dans79]

There's no compelling argument for why he would be bad with venturi cars, it's just an excuse. These cars aren't that dissimilar to the previous gen, they have similar amounts of downforce, cornering performance, braking performance etc. The driving style change is small enough that for a guy of Hamilton's talent it should have been a relatively easy transition, not something you struggle with for 4 years.

This generation of car really dislikes late breaking for 2 interrelated reasons. Downforce from the floor is very ride height and pitch sensitive. The simplified suspensions (no more hydraulics) has limited the engineers abilities to control pitch. Late breaking makes a car pitch more severely, and doing it in a ground effects car leads to DF instability.

How do you know he hasn't changed his driving style? The margins between P1 and P20 are often less than 1% Perhaps other drivers are just better at rolling into the turns than him!

As for next season I would actually be more worried about how his driving style adapts than current gen. His signature is late braking. With the new gen cars late braking is basically not going to be a thing because of all the harvesting towards the end of the straight. The deceleration distance will be elongated and the performance is going to come from whoever can carry the most speed through the corner and get back on power first. It won't be last of the late brakers.

In 2014-2016 they did lots of lifting and costing and he did just fine then! Mostly because you only had to ease into some corners on some tracks to recharge, not every corner on every track!

Imo, the issue is far more nuanced than you are attempting to make it sound.