LM10 wrote: ↑21 Apr 2019, 18:24
I don’t think they went a wrong aero concept or whatever has been told by Rosberg. It feels like a no brainer that their front wing produces less downforce looking at it’s design. I don’t think Ferrari is surprised, they must have known that before.
It's going to come down to development potential. Throughout the year, at the majority of circuits, the teams will be adding downforce to their cars.
To be fast and efficient, you have to balance out the car's downforce levels at the front and rear. Ferrari will have to decide whether they'll be able to develop the front end adequately with their existing concept. It's an important decision because the FW affects so many aerodynamic components downstream.
In China, Ferrari had to run a larger rear wing (they didn't run the lower-downforce, "spoon wing") to try to claw back some laptime in the corners. The spoon rear wing with less downforce was creating a better balanced car, and they were a bit quicker on the straights, but they were losing too much time in the corners.
"[T]he low downforce rear wing which gave the car a better balance was just way too far out of the car’s aero efficiency range to give a good lap time. It gave a balance only by being down on grip at both ends, but didn’t give enough extra straight-line speed in to overcome that in terms of lap time. So here was Ferrari stretching right into the inefficient part of its aero map – a part where ordinarily it wouldn’t dream of running – just to try to get a balance." (Mark Hughes)
I'm interested to see if Ferrari runs the spoon RW at Baku. They're going to be rapid in the final sector.