F1 News: Technical Analyst Delivers Damning Ferrari Verdict That Could Worry Lewis Hamilton

Craig Scarborough strips down the SF-24 in a detailed analysis, only to conclude that Ferrari might need an upgrade mid-season to compete with Red Bull.

Renowned technical analyst Craig Scarborough has studied Ferrari's 2024 title contender, the SF-24, in detail to understand if the work done at Maranello over the winter break is potent enough to topple the competition this year. His verdict highlights areas on the car that may need attention in the form of upgrades, apart from other points that could give Lewis Hamilton a cause for concern regarding his move to Ferrari in 2025.

Indeed, Hamilton's impending shift to Ferrari stands out as one of the most surprising announcements in recent Formula 1 history. However, Scuderia's prolonged championship drought can be seen as an alarming cause of concern. The last driver to secure a World Championship for Ferrari was Kimi Raikkonen in 2007, coinciding with Hamilton's inaugural F1 season. The last two teams to have won championships in the past decade in F1, are Mercedes and Red Bull.

Mercedes F1

Consequently, one might expect Hamilton to be sweating a bit for 2025, especially when his desire to win an eighth championship is considered. Speaking on Peter Windsor’s YouTube channel, Scarborough expressed that the SF-24 resembles the SF-23 from last year, as he put a big question mark on the car's floor, judging from what is seen in the images. He said in his verdict:

“It’s a radical evolution from what they had last year, but the car they’ve produced this year looks to me like a 2023 car.

“It just doesn’t look like they’ve taken things to the extremes that everyone else is going, so my first guess is that this maybe isn’t the step that Ferrari were looking for.

“Having said that, they ended last year in a very good position. They found a lot with tyre management and getting the car to be balanced and the things that we can’t tell from renders and laps at Fiorano is what’s actually happening with the car, particularly with the floor, which is the most important thing.

“We simply can’t judge that at this stage, but I am slightly disappointed with what we saw on the SF-24.

“There’s changes to the floor that we can’t see; what we can see is that secondary effect with what they’ve done with the sidepods and they have potentially found a whole heap of performance from those sidepods, getting the floor to work better.

“The other thing Ferrari really struggled with last year – which was probably to do with their lack of downforce – was tyre management.

“And although they did improve through the season in coping with that, they still had an underlying issue that came back to bite them at various races.

“What’s interesting is that Ferrari haven’t really substantially changed the outboard parts of the suspension, front and rear, from what we can see, so there’s no big geometrical changes to the suspension, so hopefully they’ve found other ways of getting the tyres to work better, particularly in the race.

“They qualified really well, but that is always the other side of the coin to tyre performance.

“If you qualify well, typically you race worse and last year Red Bull were quite open that they didn’t really have that one-lap performance on the tyres but we saw their race performance was completely in control of those Pirellis.

“So we have to start to question what Ferrari are finding in this car without making big, obvious changes that, to this point, we can’t see.

“[But] Fred Vasseur did say most of the changes are under the skin, so you’re talking about inboard suspension, the shape of the underfloor and stuff like that, so we can only judge what we can see at this stage.”

Ferrari Press Image

Changes to the SF-24's Nose 

Scarborough mentioned that Red Bull nailed the shape of the nose last year and it looks like Ferrari has followed a similar direction this year. He added:

“Ferrari have gone for a wider nose.

I thought people were going to shape the nose much more this year, trying to get much more of an aerodynamic effect.

“I think a lot of teams are making the nose much flatter, much wider in order to get the crash performance out of it and that really plays around with the pressure where the nose meets the trailing edge of the front wing.

“This is something that Red Bull really got worked out – putting rotation into that airflow going towards the floor and Ferrari have moved in that direction slightly."

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Ferrari Sidepod Design a Step Behind 

The technical expert then offered a detailed analysis of what he thinks Ferrari did to the SF-24's sidepods. However, his verdict suggests that the Red team could have followed a more 'radical approach'. Maybe, the Marnello outfit plans to play it safe in the initial stages of the 2024 season. Scarborough explained:

“One of the curious things is around the sidepod fronts.

“The sidepod fronts have what we call the ‘underbite’, where you don’t have a top closure to the sidepods. Looking at the geometry of that, the inlets don’t look especially higher or narrower than last year. It literally looks like they’ve cut the top off.

“But they have moved the side-impact structure, which used to be inside the sidepods and [meant there was] a little bump sticking out of the Ferrari last year.

“They’ve now moved that down to the floor where everyone else has it and that allows them to put a really big undercut into that sidepod.

“That is really where the performance now starts to come because they’re working the front half of the floor edge much harder, which will give them much more balanced downforce because it’s creating downforce almost at the centre of gravity in the middle of the car, so that’s one big change that almost goes unnoticed.

“With the sidepods, what they haven’t done is gone for the big gulleys – the big water slides – that was a big feature of so many cars last year, particularly the Aston Martin.

“That worries me because the shape of the sidepods now is becoming one of the secondary defining features after the floor and the suspension and everyone is trying to get much more airflow down to the diffuser by putting these gulleys into the sidepods.

“Ferrari haven’t gone quite extreme with that and I can see no reason why they wouldn’t have, so you think: ‘What’s in their mind? Why aren’t they playing about with this?’

“It’s not because of cooling because nowadays the volume of the sidepods is so much bigger than they need to be, because they’re partly using the shape of the sidepods to replicate what bargeboards used to do by keeping front-tyre wake away from the rest of the car.

“Again, you just feel like Ferrari are a step behind what everyone else is doing.

“The work they’ve done over the winter is massive because they’ve gone away from their old bathtub sidepods and big cooling louvres and all of that. But they’ve caught up with what everyone was doing early last year rather than what everyone was doing by the end of last year.

“And as we’ve seen with the Aston Martin, people are getting even more extreme with shapes and the volumes they use in these areas."

Ferrari Press Image

Not a Championship Winning Car, Yet

Scarborough claims that Ferrari might have upped the pace this year, but he isn't sure if it has done enough to close the gap to Red Bull in the form of a championship-winning car, just yet. He concluded:

“I’m wary of Ferrari thinking that they can aim for championships with the car, because it looks to me as though they’re going to launch this car, run with it for the first handful of races and then probably produce a big update to it.

“And that’s not how you win championships. You’ve got to be ready at the first race, especially if you’re fighting against Red Bull now and you’ve got to expect a resurgence from Mercedes; McLaren are looking strong; Aston Martin are there or thereabouts.

“You can’t afford to give away a handful of races at this stage of the season and expect to win a championship.

“Having said that – depending on the level of Red Bull’s superiority – I see no reason why Ferrari wouldn’t be competitive with their rivals.

“But I just don’t know if they’ve closed that gap to Red Bull quite as much as they need to.”

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