At Ferrari, there is discontent over the corrections to the Balance of Performance, which after Le Mans clipped the wings of the 499P. The Maranello company is not the only one and behind the scenes we continue to discuss the best approach to balancing performance, with the aim of restoring a relationship of trust between the teams and the FIA-ACO organisation. However, the BoP is not the only element influencing the Cavallino’s recent results. In Maranello we continue to study and work to understand and fine-tune the 499P on those circuits that still remain indigestible.
Conservative approach
Fuji was the worst qualifying of the season for the Reds, who had previously performed well excellent competitiveness on the flying lap. To the pole positions won at Sebring and Le Mans is added the one canceled at Spa due to exceeding track limits and the pole missed at Monza by just 17 thousandths. From the outside, the impression is that Ferrari has no difficulty in setting up the car from a mechanical and aerodynamic point of view to hunt for absolute performance. When it comes to aggressive inflation pressures, camber angles and toe-in, the 499P manages to extract maximum grip from the tire.
The problem, however, remains the race pace, where the Red team is not always able to express the same pace. From the results of the stopwatch and the statements of the key figures, it emerges at Ferrari a highly conservative approach to tire management, which reveals a strong anxiety, evidently motivated, towards excessive degradation. The concern emerges in the recurring use of the hardest compounds available, but not only. The 499P is slow in bringing the tires up to temperature, a sign of very docile set-up choices on the tyres. At Fuji there were 11 and 14 seconds lost in the race respectively by the best of the Toyotas and the Porsches in the laps coming out of the pits.
Reading keys
The picture at Ferrari can be interpreted from a mechanical point of view. The adoption of gentle adjustments for the suspensions, such as low camber and toe angles for the wheels, help the rubber to deform more uniformly, better distributing the heat generated and thus limiting overheating and degradation. The collateral effect, however, is a narrowing of the tire’s contact patch on the ground when cornering, with a reduction in the available grip. As always happens in motorsport, to control the degradation one is forced to give up performance.
The best Ferrari of 2023 is the one seen at Spa and Le Mans, when the BoP was certainly more favorable but where the races were still held on tracks with low severity for the tyres. In mitigating conditions for degradation, the 499P did not hold back and was able to express its potential. However, all this does not exclude an aerodynamic interpretation. The competitiveness shown in Belgium and France suggests an aerodynamic map whose efficiency is optimized at high speeds, a quality that gives the 499P superiority on straights and in high-volume bends.
On the other hand, on those tracks that require a high downforce configuration, the Red seems to have too much difficulty in releasing sufficient downforce, which in addition to a lack of grip also leads to problems in transferring energy to the tires to get them up to temperature. Also at Spa and Le Mans Ferrari showed itself at ease in the fast corners, a sign of a car that behaves well when it comes to shifting the balance towards the front. Conversely, on the more tortuous tracks such as Fuji and Portimao where the traction qualities of the rear emerge, the Red runs into difficulty. It is no coincidence that the 499P is a car that likes low temperatures, which in addition to containing degradation also help to find greater grip on the rear axle.
The BoP factor
In those contexts where performance is lacking, more aggressive mechanical settings are necessary to extract grip from the tyre, with the result of worsening degradation. The dynamic is emphasized by the new Balance of Performance tables. The increase in weight imposed on the 499P intensifies the stress on the tyres, while the reduction in available power forces it to unload the aerodynamics, losing further grip and struggling to transfer sufficient energy to the tyres. This highlights the difficulty in defining the most correct approach for the BoP: balancing performance on the flying lap or taking into consideration the repercussions on the race pace, possibly deciding how to manage them.
Overall, in its debut season the 499P is a car that enters the optimal window of operation on medium-high speed circuits, with low aerodynamic load and cooler ambient temperatures. Vice versa, in Maranello we are working to optimize the package on the other types of circuits where, between the new BoP and the progress of the competition, the opponents are increasingly threatening. On the other hand, Porsche is a car that complies with LMDh regulations, which, being born as an exclusively rear-wheel drive car, expresses itself better on rear limited tracks.
The future
Compared to Toyota, Ferrari pays the lack of knowledge of the car-tyre package on circuits new to her, an inevitable gap in her debut season. The data collected in the races held so far will offer an excellent starting point for improving the car’s set-up in future editions. In addition to this, in Maranello we are thinking about whether to immediately use the tokens available to update the car, possibly reviewing its balance and aerodynamic map.
Changes from this perspective would help find more performance on the most difficult circuits at the moment, thus allowing the use of better set-ups in terms of managing degradation. The difficulty, however, lies in preventing the innovations from distorting the nature of the 499P, sacrificing the competitiveness seen on tracks such as Spa and Le Mans. The only certainty is that between setups and updates to the car at Ferrari there is potential to growas Toyota itself continues to do, which despite the third year of the GR010 still continues to remove heavy seconds from the clock.
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