Jock Clear, engineer and director of the Ferrari Driver Academy, has released some statements regarding the difficulties encountered by the Maranello team this year. The botched updates could be partly traced back to a discrepancy between data from the wind tunnel and that collected on the track.
Ferrari Difficulty: Jock Clear on Track-Data Correlations
There are two different seasons for Ferrari this year. The first ends in Monte Carlo, with Leclerc not far behind Max Verstappen in the drivers' standings. The second begins in Barcelona, with a substantial Update package which did not bring the desired results. The developments brought to Catalonia mainly concerned the underbody and rear end of the car, in the hope of generating greater aerodynamic load. This gain was indeed there, but at the same time it caused the car to suffer from a notable aerodynamic rebound, better known as “bouncing”. A collateral effect probably due, as he well explained Federico Albano, to the inability of the Ferrari suspension, designed with respect to the original SF-24 project, to support the increase in aerodynamic load.
For the umpteenth time Ferrari was forced to take a step back, forcing Sainz and Leclerc to race with the old specifications in the Austrian and British GPs, finding a certain competitiveness only from Spa onwards. We will see, at the end of this short winter break, if in Maranello they have found a project of constant growth and above all if the SF-24 will be able to compete with McLaren also in Austin, where the fast corners, the Achilles heel of the reds, are numerous.
In this 2024, however, not only Ferrari has stumbled upon faulty updates. The same fate for Racing Bulls, which has always lost a lot in terms of performance since Barcelona, but it is also true for Mercedes, which after winning at Silverstone and Spa seems to have returned behind McLaren, Ferrari and Red Bull. The latter, however, presents the most striking case, with the Austrian team that has moved to cover the role of third force in the world championship.
Clear on simulations: “Absolute precision impossible with low cars”
Since the 2022 regulation came into force, the cars have all suffered, more or less, from these bouncing effects or problems with the balance of the cars. The positive side of all this is that the free practices on Friday and Saturday, especially this year, have proven to be even more crucial than usual. Red Bull, working hard on the setup over the Singapore weekend, managed to turn the situation around. And so, also taking advantage of the mistakes of its opponents, it brought home an unexpected second place. In such a context, the work done in the factory becomes increasingly crucial. The work done in the wind tunnels, the simulations and the data collected are therefore fundamental for bringing updates and preparing setups.
However, not all these elements always manage to find the right correlation. Virtual and real track do not always fit together properly, as stated by Jock Clear.Occasionally we are faced with discrepancies between the wind tunnel and the trackHis We are already waiting for the next one, I know that sooner or later it will happen again.” This is because the tracks of the circuits can present a certain amount of variations, which are difficult to reproduce in the factory. The type of asphalt, its conditions and temperatures, as well as the reaction that the car can have on a certain type of curb. All these elements complicate the predictions, especially when the cars, like those of this generation, find themselves with a surface very close to the asphalt.
"As long as the cars are far enough away from the asphalt surface it is not difficult to obtain a good data correlation.. But since the difference in downforce generated is made in the five millimetres that separate the asphalt from the bottom of the car it's almost It is impossible to have 100% accuracy". Clear told Auto Motor Und Sport. The engineer reiterated the importance of these tools.It's not that our tools have improved.. SThey are identical to the ones we had before Barcelona, but we understood and interpreted some elements differently. Bouncing occurs when you have too much aerodynamic load. It all depends on how close you get to this limit without exceeding it. This is because aerodynamic load is only useful if the car remains stable, only in this way can the driver benefit from it.. "
Source statements: Formulapassion.it
