F1 | Cardile: “SF-24 redesigned to overcome defects in 2023”

After a long wait, the big day has finally arrived, the one in which Ferrari's latest single-seater was revealed. The SF-24 presents itself as a sort of silent revolution which, although it takes up some concepts and ideas already introduced last season with the Barcelona package, wants to start again with a totally new project to overcome those constraints and defects that had limited the SF-24 23.

The Red has changed face, abandoning the concept it had focused on in 2022 and at the beginning of 2023 to follow a new direction, so much so that even the technical director defined the latest addition to Maranello as a breaking point with the past.

For example, observing the belly area, it is clear that the decision to move the lower anti-intrusion cone by incorporating it into the bottom has allowed us to increase the underpanel, in line with concepts already seen on other single-seaters. The radiator mouth takes up the tray shape seen on Red Bull and other single-seaters, even if the shapes are not as exaggerated as those of its rivals.

Ferrari SF-24

Photo by: Ferrari

During the interview, Enrico Cardile focused precisely on these elements, underlining how the SF-24 represents a totally new platform to overcome the limits and defects that characterized last championship's project.

“When designing the SF-24 we did not set ourselves any constraints. It was important to create a completely new platform that would allow us to overcome the development limitations we encountered last year with the SF-23. Therefore, all areas of the car were affected from a complete redesign,” explained the technical director.

The package introduced in Barcelona had in fact modified the identity of the SF-23, which was however still bound to some basic design limits on which it would have been possible to intervene in depth only during the development of the 2024 machine.

“In terms of development objectives, the SF-24 has the same ones that we had followed in the season during the development of the SF-23 from the arrival of the Barcelona package onwards. It represents a clear break in terms of what we try to get from the car compared to the 2022 and 2023 single-seaters.”

Ferrari SF-24

Photo by: Divulgacao

Approaching the 2024 project, Cardile revealed that there were mainly two key points followed during development. On the one hand, having a car that guaranteed a good correlation between what was seen in the wind tunnel simulations and the data collected on the track, while on the other, another big objective was to improve the car's handling.

It is no mystery that last year the drivers complained on several occasions about the characteristics of the car in terms of driving pleasure, underlining how unpredictable it was, especially in the first part of the season. This pushed the pilots to drive with a style that was not always natural, also having to deal with the SF-23's great sensitivity to the wind, which often represented a limiting factor. During the development of the SF-24, therefore, we tried to transform the feedback from Leclerc and Sainz into concrete actions during 2023 and in the simulator sessions, in order to deliver a more predictable and simple car to drive.

“The guiding principles we set ourselves in the development of the SF-24 were to improve the handling of our car, to give our drivers a car whose potential is easier to exploit than last year. The other objective was to have a robust platform, to have a car that does what we expect on the track and what we see in the wind tunnel,” explained Cardile.

“Our goal as engineers is to transform driver comments into engineering greats. The car was born and developed starting from the comments of our drivers, then transformed into engineering objectives. So the drivers are the architects of our development and, as engineers, our job is to understand what to do and how to develop the car to make them happy on the track.”