By Carlo Platella
In 2023 Ferrari was the first of Toyota’s pursuers in the season of its return to the premier class. On some occasions the Scuderia from Maranello has adopted a different approach to the world champions with the tyres, sometimes fitting harder compounds than their direct rivals. However, if in the very first races the choice served to counteract tire degradation, later on Ferrari showed greater consistency over time, with the delay accumulated in the race mainly due to a lack of pace. Hence the decision to resort to unusual strategies, differentiating itself from Toyota in an attempt to circumvent its greater competitiveness.
The Spa incident
In an interview published on the pages of Racecar Engineering, Matthieu Bonardel, director of Michelin’s motorsport activities, commented on Ferrari’s initial approach to the various compounds available: “At the start the car was not optimized and was aggressive on the tyres. Every time they tried the softs there was degradation, while the mediums suffered from graining, so they tried the hards and they were fine. They loved the hard ones so much that they used them even when it was very cold, but then they crashed, because there is a limit.”
The episode Bonardel refers to is that of the 6 hours of Spa, in which despite the low temperatures and the wet asphalt Ferrari decided to use hard tyres, encountering great difficulty in getting them up to temperature. The cold tires were precisely the cause of the accident of car #50, which had just left the pits with Antonio Fuoco at the wheel. Still on Racecar Engineering however, Ferdinando Cannizzo explains how the strategy at the time was not dictated by the anxiety of degradation: “The decision to use one compound rather than another It depends on many factors that aren’t just the tires”.
“Sometimes compounds are used to go beyond gaps that cannot be filled, with the hope that they will give us an advantage on the strategy for example. If we were on the same strategy, we would lose the race simply because we could only follow them. This is what happened in Spa.” The technical manager then adds: “If we can’t win by being the fastest on every lap, let’s try to understand how can we cross the finish line first in another way”.
Progress with the soft tires
Although, according to Ferrari, the different strategies also depended on other reasons in addition to tire management, Michelin is convinced that the Italian team has made progress in exploiting the various compounds. Bonardel explains: “They have slowly started to understand that they can go much faster using the softer compound. They have begun to understand what each tire can give and now they are much better at using them”. It is therefore a Ferrari that is heading towards 2024 with more options available, but whether or not the Cavallino will continue to adopt alternative strategies will also depend on what the actual performance gap from Toyota will be.
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