Ferrari team boss Fred Vasseur believes the Italian outfit is close to a breakthrough in understanding the aerodynamic issue that undermined its car’s recent upgrade package, but a fix won’t be available for Hungary.
The Scuderia finds itself in a bit of a rut heading into the final two races before F1’s summer break. Significant upgrades introduced last month in Barcelona aimed at improving performance backfired, leading to a slump and underwhelming results relative to Ferrari’s direct rivals – Red Bull, McLaren and Mercedes.
Unfortunately, the team’s recent development package caused a resurgence of the dreaded porpoising phenomenon that hindered Ferrari’s car in the past, significantly impacting both Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz.
Reacting swiftly, Ferrari scaled back the upgrade at the British Grand Prix, focusing on back-to-back testing on Friday at Silverstone to understand the problem.
While this approach has mitigated the SF-24’s bouncing issues, it leaves the team with a compromised car for next week’s race at the Hungaroring, although the venue's high-downforce environment might prove less problematic for Ferrari's car.
"It is an aero problem, yes, because we changed the aero parts and the bouncing appeared in Spain," Vasseur told the media last weekend.
"To fix it, you have tons of solutions, solutions with and without compromise on performance, or developing a package and I think we are there now.
"We will have to deal with it at the next race with the current car, and the sooner the better we will bring an upgrade with less bouncing.
©Ferrari
Despite the team’s latest setback, Vasseur highlighted the Scuderia’s positive track record in terms of upgrades since he’s been in charge.
"Honestly, I cannot speak about 2020, 2021 or 1994, but in the last 16 months, all the upgrades we brought had a very, very good correlation with what we did in the wind tunnel,” he said.
"It was one of the assets of the team over last year to bring smaller upgrades that paid off each time, but for this one, we had an issue."
Ferrari's plan for extensive testing in FP1 at Silverstone was thrown a curveball by the uncooperative British weather. Cold and wet conditions plagued the entire race weekend, making "sacrificing" Friday practice for diagnostics a "difficult" decision according to Vasseur.
Despite the limitations, the Frenchman defended the strategic shift, believing that prioritizing understanding the SF-24's issues over chasing pure performance was the right call in the long run.
©Ferrari
"Compromising or sacrificing Friday sessions when you know that you are losing time during the weekend, that it is okay to forget about FP1, FP2, to be focused on the mid-term, this is a decision that as a team was very difficult," he said.
"You start the weekend, and it was even worse in Silverstone because of the weather, and we put ourselves in a tough situation, but at least we knew beforehand. We took the decision before the weekend and I think it was the right call to do it.
"Correlation is okay, the downforce and the correlation is okay. I think it is still a question for everybody that sometimes the bouncing pops up, and it is quite difficult to correlate because you don't have bouncing in the wind tunnel.
"I don't want to go deep into detail, but we all have metrics and you cannot anticipate that you would have more bouncing with this upgrade path than another one, but to know if it would have a negative impact on performance is another story."
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