Ferrari feels that it has got on top of its 2024 bouncing issues, which senior performance engineer Jock Clear believes is simply part of the challenges presented by the current ground-effect regulations.
A floor upgrade for the Spanish Grand Prix promised to build on the performance offered by the previous iteration introduced at May’s Imola round, but instead triggered bouncing in the higher-speed corners at the Barcelona circuit.
This led Ferrari to roll back on the new floor for Silverstone and the team revised its underbody geometry for the Hungary round ahead of the summer break.
Ferrari showed renewed vigour in Baku which led to Charles Leclerc taking pole, and looked promising in Singapore before Carlos Sainz’s Q3 crash rather derailed the team’s weekend.
Explaining the process of identifying the team’s issues, Clear explained that the team needed to investigate the “anomaly” between the wind tunnel and the circuit before it moved to a new development course.
“You’re never fully confident – but I think it’s a good picture of how the ebb and flow of everybody’s development goes,” Clear explained.
“But you’re probably asking the same questions to [other teams] – have you lost your way? And certainly after Spain, we didn’t feel we’d lost our way, but there was some anomaly between what was happening in the tunnel and what we were seeing on track, and we had to get on top of that.
“That’s just the process; when you see an anomaly, you have to get on top of it, try and understand it, and then get back on track.
“And I think what you’ve seen since is that we’ve understood it, we got back on track, we just have to be eyes wide open for what the next anomaly will be, because there will be another one because that is the process at the moment.
Charles Leclerc, Ferrari SF-24, leads Fernando Alonso, Aston Martin AMR24
Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images
“So it’s not that sometimes the development works, sometimes these developments don’t work: the development process is exactly that you are testing something new every week.
“We’re confident that our process is working, confident that we’re on top of everything. We’ll just wait for the next banana skin.”
Clear explained the challenges of developing floor geometry with the current regulations, explaining that the wind tunnel’s efficacy is reduced when it comes to measuring a car in various dynamic conditions.
He says that the differences in floor height are the key mitigating factor, as the differences in downforce output are magnified by small changes in ride height.
“I think ever since we brought these ground effect cars back, it’s presented challenges that have… in simple terms, when the car’s a long way from the floor and the floor is not generating huge amounts of downforce based on its proximity to the floor, then the tunnel can be pretty accurate.
“But as soon as you get into what’s happening over a kerb, what’s happening when you’re bouncing, the tunnel can’t do that.
“We can bounce the car up and down. But of course, the data then looks a mess. But however much the data looks a mess on track, the driver has to drive it.
“There’s a certain level of correlation between the tunnel and the track, that it’s difficult that you’re ever going to get 100% fidelity.
“You’re always going to have these anomalies and with the ground effect, the anomalies are bigger because that proximity to the ground becomes all the more powerful as soon as it.
“When it gets to zero, you lose all your downforce, And when it comes back up to five millimetres, you get loads of downforce and you get into this really peaky area on the floor. And everybody’s challenged with that all the time.”
