Ferrari underline cause of failed F1 upgrades

Ferrari senior performance engineer Jock Clear has explained what caused the Italian to struggle with the upgrades it introduced earlier in the season.

Having successfully brought updates to Imola, winning the subsequent race in Monaco, the Scuderia ported further developments two rounds later, at the Spanish Grand Prix.

However, both Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz immediately found difficulties in the package, notably an increase in bouncing.

This led to the belief that, as has often been the case for many teams under the current ground-effect regulations, Ferrari had taken a wrong turn in its development path.

Clear pointed out that the upgrades did return the expected step forward in downforce, but the occurrence of bouncing prevented the Maranello squad from translating that to improved performance and gains in lap time on track.

Whilst Ferrari did ultimately have to shelve part of that package and build back to the specification used in its most recent victory, in Monza, the root of the issue was the inherent difficulty in correlating the modelling of developments with their real-world counterparts.

“Because it’s only something that manifests itself when you actually get in the real car, it’s very difficult to model,” Clear explained to media including RacingNews365.

“So the more you see of it, and basically the more track time you get, the more correlation you can get.

“I would say we’re comfortable with having correlated better what we’re seeing.

“Obviously we’re not comfortable with the fact that some of our upgrades have been compromised somewhat by that bouncing.

“And the drivers have found that it’s got the downforce, but it’s really difficult to actually drive the car when that bouncing starts to initiate.”

Bouncing will be ‘less and less of a problem’ for Ferrari

The 60-year-old highlighted that part of what has allowed the Scuderia to eradicate the issue more recently is an increase in data and information available to better prepare its models.

After the round in Barcelona, Ferrari spent the subsequent races unwinding the Spanish specification, to identify what specifically was causing the bouncing.

Now, Clear is confident that when faced with similar circuit profiles towards the end of the campaign, the Italian team will be better prepared.

“As I say, we’re comfortable that we’re modelling that better now, simply because we’ve got more data and we’ve tuned our models,” the Briton added.

“Going forward, we would expect that to be less and less of a problem.

“Towards the end of the year we’ll see some high downforce circuits again, where that might have reared its head earlier in the season, and we’re confident we’ll be doing a better job for those.”