F1 News: Ferrari To Develop "Brand New" Car For 2024 - "Will Be Very Different"
Ferrari has acknowledged the challenges faced with their SF-23 car during the 2023 F1 season, with Enrico Cardile pinpointing aerodynamic issues as the primary concern. Looking forward, the team is focusing on a completely new design for 2024, aiming to overcome the current car's limitations.
Ferrari is gearing up for a renewed bid in the 2024 season after a less than stellar outing this current season. This comes amidst struggles with their SF-23, a car that has not quite lived up to the championship aspirations of The Scuderia.
The satin-red racing car has been inconsistent an spikey, facing fluctuations in performance and over-sensitivity to track conditions that saw Ferrari bagging only three podium finishes this season.
Cardile’s Take at the Dutch Grand Prix
Cardile, Ferrari's Technical Director, addressed the media at the Dutch Grand Prix, admitting that the Maranello squad has identified the issue with the SF-23.
“For us, it is crystal clear what we did wrong with the car,” he admitted. “Which are the weaknesses is clear. It’s not a matter of understanding what we should do.
“Now, for the future, it’s a matter of delivering a good product which will cope with the targets we have. So, we are not in nowhere land.
“We know what we have to do. It’s a matter of doing. It’s a matter of finding the right contents of the car, the right architecture or the car to achieve the target.
“The other point is this car is consistent during the race weekend in terms of behaviour, but sometimes this behaviour changes from track to track. In Hungary, we had a difficult time, in Belgium the performance was back. So sometimes this happens but then during the weekend if the car is consistent we can work on it.
“On this track we dedicated FP1 to specific tests, to better tune our toolset, to better operate the car this year and to have data to improve the behaviour of the car next year.”
Pinpointing the Aero Problem
“We think that our main weakness is on the aero characteristics of the car, so all the focus since T1 [pre-season testing in Bahrain] when it has been pretty clear that we were not at the level we expected to be, the weakness was coming from there.
“So all the focus, all the efforts has been since T1 on improving the aero characteristics of the car.”
All-New Car For Ferrari For 2024
“This year has been crucial for us, to put a lot of effort on this year’s car, to better understand from where the weaknesses were coming, and how to do a better job,” he continued.
“So we kept developing the car in the wind tunnel since the summer break. We will bring some updates in the next races but now [in the] wind tunnel we are fully focused on next year’s car.”
It's no surprise that Ferrari is releasing an "brand new" car next year, which will see the bugs they've found in the SF-23 fixed.
2024 Ferrari Details
Being asked if he can divulge anything on the 2024 car, he answered:
“Not a lot, but it will be very different, because developing this year’s car we realised that some architectural choices we did were not right. It was constraining the development too much.
“From there next year’s car will not be an evolution of this year’s car like this year’s car has been compared to last year’s car, but it will be a brand new car – different chassis with different design, different rear end to allow our aero [department] to better develop the car to achieve their targets.”