The shakedown of the Ferrari SF-24 in the 200 km filming day in Fiorano, still underway, did not disappoint expectations. On its home track, confirming the rumors we had managed to gather, Ferrari tested the new aerodynamic package which will then make its debut next week in Imola. The 200 km traveled by the new Ferrari, driven in the morning by Charles Leclerc and in the afternoon by Carlos Sainz (100 km each), allowed us to observe the important innovations that according to Leclerc will indicate the objectives for the rest of the season. The entire package was brought to the track at Fioranobased on what has been gathered, therefore all the new features that we will then see on the banks of the Santerno in a week and on which the Maranello team technicians have been working since March with a certain optimism.
Enrico Cardile’s technical breakthrough is implemented to skip intermediate development steps
The Maranello team’s change of skin has much deeper roots than it might seem. The technical group led by Enrico Cardile, in fact, knows that if it wants to reach Red Bull by 2025 it must build development paths that maximize the pursuit of performance. The bellies entrance, revised in the version with shark mouths, are a clear example in this direction, given that, we have already told you how the men of the pony, despite not initially having positive feedback, have not set aside the concept carried forward from Red Bull, but also from Mclaren, this year. The Italian team decided during construction to skip an intermediate step – that is, to keep the bellies with the lower lip elongated following the 2023 technical trend and moving directly to the 2024 shark mouths of Waché and Balbo’s car.
The reasons are not only linked to budget savings, but to the awareness of the horsemen who, if you want to try to reach Red Bull, you have to dare. The technical goodness shown by the 676 project, which we spoke about extensively over the winter, was well demonstrated on the track, with the victory in Australia as the high point of this start of the season, together with the many podiums achieved. However, the difficult part certainly comes now, that is, in that strong and important battle of updates which is often decisive in gaining or losing positions on the track. The innovations that Ferrari will bring to Imola, of which we will semi-definitively evaluate the extra performance on the Santerno circuit, will have the task of trying to bring the SF-24 closer to Red Bull, returning second force on the track, after two Grands Awards in which Mclaren performed stronger overall than the SF-24.
Not just shark mouths: The SF-24 abandons the belly by-pass system
The Ferrari 2.0 has the most important components of the package in the bottom and in the bellies, even if the restyling of the cooling inlets did not lead to a relocation of the radiating masses. The SF-24 which ran in the first six GPs had only 5% of the technical solutions present on the complicated SF-23 of the previous year, including the S-Duct or by-pass Duct solution, i.e. that internal duct which is useful for bringing air from the bottom of the undercut to the upper wall of the bellies. However, from what we have gathered, the updated SF-24 has definitively set aside the by-pass duct systemalso used on the 2023 car.
The exit vent, implemented around the cockpit fins in the SF-24 Launch Spec, has been effectively removed, with the only exit vent on the SF-24’s hood no longer connected to the vertical inlet in front of the bellies and is simply a new and different compromise that Ferrari has studied to make cooling and aerodynamics work synergistically. The vertical entrance, which is now directly joined to the shark mouths forming a sort of “P” entrance in Alpine and also Mercedes style, therefore has the exclusive cooling and internal blowing function. On these new generation cars, internal aerodynamics is something even more fundamental to achieve the right efficiency and drag reduction targets and on this, Red Bull had an important advantage at least until the middle of last season. Returning to Ferrari, and concluding, the abandonment of the by-pass system is a sign that Ferrari has definitively started a different path of development especially compared to the Reds of the previous two years.
