Ferrari Identifies Crucial Wind Tunnel 'Anomaly' Amid Bouncing Issues

Saajan Jogia | Sep 26, 2024

Charles Leclerc wins the Italian Grand Prix. / Ferrari

The Ferrari F1 team appears to have resolved the bouncing issues plaguing the SF-24 car, which became a significant challenge following the upgrades introduced after the Spanish Grand Prix. By revisiting their wind tunnel data, the team identified an "anomaly" that contrasted with the car's on-track performance, enabling it to address the differences.

The Maranello outfit got off to a promising start this season and remained optimistic about the floor upgrade it rolled out at Barcelona, aimed to enhance the performance established by the previous iteration introduced at Imola in May.

However, Ferrari encountered a peculiar problem that plagued cars in the first year of the ground effect era, in 2022. Both drivers, Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz, encountered bouncing issues in high-speed corners at the Barcelona circuit.

As the season progressed, the team continued to investigate the root cause of the problem, often struggling in the process. However, the strong performance at the Azerbaijan GP boosted confidence. Charles Leclerc not only secured pole position but also finished the race in second place, indicating that the team was on the right track in addressing the discrepancies between the wind tunnel data and on-track performance.

Ferrari's senior performance engineer Jock Clear explained the complexities of ground effect, revealing that anomalies will continue to show up. He told Motorsport.com:

"You're never fully confident - but I think it's a good picture of how the ebb and flow of everybody's development goes.

"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. 

"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 then elaborated on the wind tunnel's limitations, noting that it fails to account for ride height variations when driving over the kerbs, considering how dependent ground effect cars are on the gap between the ground and the floor. He added:

"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."