Ferrari gives a shy smile to his home crowd on Friday in Monza, despite being aware of a nearby McLaren and above all of the traffic that has hindered Verstappen so far. Many times the Cavallino has been given the nickname of Friday champions, precisely due to the effectiveness of the Reds at the beginning of the weekend, not always confirmed in the decisive sessions. However, what began as a nickname now begins to make us reflect on the strengths and shortcomings of the Maranello team.
Ferrari starts well
The good times released by Ferrari in the Monza free practice are not a source of particular surprise. The SF-23 is a car optimized around a low downforce working point, which also mitigates unpredictability and balance issues. The Red is a car that performs at its best on the fastest circuitsas the best results obtained in Baku, Montreal and Austria also suggest, occasions in which the team managed to extract the maximum from the car package.
In an increasingly compact group, where every tenth can cost entire rows on the starting grid, getting as close as possible to maximum potential can make the difference. A concept reaffirmed several times by Vasseur, who moves attention away from the characteristics of the SF-23 project, shifting it to the team’s ability to optimize its set-up on the track. “It’s not a matter of package potentialbut of the team’s ability to extract it in the best possible way”, the mantra repeated by the Team Principal.
The set-up road
The path to arrive at the optimal set-up consists of two phases. The first is what happens in the factory, when the possible aerodynamic and mechanical combinations are studied on the simulator to define the starting configuration. In the field of virtual simulation, Ferrari is sending out signals that it has very little to complain about. The best seasonal results came in the Sprint weekendsprecisely those Grands Prix in which the reduced time available in practice means that the final set-up is very close to the initial one.
It could be argued that Ferrari’s podiums arrived on the tracks closest to the 2023 Ferrari. Looking at the history of the season, however, one notices how often the Prancing Horse showed off in the Friday sessions, even in those Grands Prix which later turned out to be suffered. Sainz was second at the end of Friday at Silverstone, while Leclerc was even first in Hungary. If it is therefore true that part of Ferrari’s problems originate from the extraction of the car’s potential, simulation in the factory is not the first offender.
Interpret the track
The set-up prepared before the race weekend is only the first stage in the approach to the final set-up. In between there are the various free practice sessions, which are extremely fundamental for reacting to real phenomena that cannot be replicated on the simulator. This practice has acquired even greater importance with the arrival of the ground-effect Formula 1 cars, as Vasseur explained on the eve of the Italian round: “There are aspects of car that they are not replicable in the wind tunnel. It didn’t happen before, but now there’s ground effect. An example is the porpoising that we experienced on the track for the first time eighteen months ago. It’s different than in the past”.
Another example of real phenomena that are difficult to model in the simulator concerns transients, i.e. the continuous change in driving conditions. “Now the flow structures under the car are much more complicated and transient,” Andrew Shovlin explained a few months ago about the difference between the current Formula 1 and the previous generation. The first simulation in the factory is therefore only part of the process of extracting potential from the car, which must be accompanied by the slow study of the data collected on the track. “You have to rely on a combination of simulations and track. […] The simulator doesn’t tell you exactly what level of confidence the driver will have in the car.”spoke in Austria Jock Clear.
The impression that emerges from the 2023 season is one Ferrari having difficulty interpreting the data arriving from the track to evolve the initial structure up to the optimal configuration. Mercedes, on the contrary, showed up several times in trouble on Friday, with a set-up base prepared on the simulator that was far from perfect, but it often showed great ability to evolve the base set-up over the course of the weekend.
At Monza, teams and riders are still far from their maximum potential. Carlos Sainz’s time of the day is 1.4 seconds away from the pole position simulations, a sign of how there is still a lot to polish in terms of performance and set-ups. Ferrari begins the Italian weekend with encouraging conditions, aware however that the rivals could make an important leap during the night.
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