What's behind Fred Vasseur's comments about "completely new" Ferrari car with "less than 1% of SF24 components"
Today at 05:36 AM
Ferrari is working on the single-seater for the 2025 Formula 1 championship. Long before expressing our opinions, thanks to those who gave us the opportunity, we have been, and continue to be, first and foremost, voracious consumers of information related to the pinnacle of motorsport. News primarily concerning the technical and analytical aspects of the discipline. We quickly realized that the emphasis placed on certain statements about Ferrari is often the subject of speculation, leading a significant portion of the public to draw rather fanciful conclusions.
The purpose? Servility and mere financial gain, just to create a scoop that in fact does not exist. During the usual Christmas lunch in Maranello, Ferrari team principal Frederic Vasseur, in addition to commenting on the results of the just-concluded 2024 Formula 1 season, also provided some indications regarding next year's technical project, which is now in an advanced stage of development: "The car will be completely new and will have less than 1% of the components present on the previous one. It will be a completely different project, but it will be the same for everyone," concluded the team principal of the Prancing Horse.
Pandemonium ensued. Alleged experts in the field are already hypothesizing who knows what innovative solutions might be the tangible sign of the Ferrari 677’s technical discontinuity compared to its predecessor. With all due respect: this is nonsense. Forgive the expression; perhaps we'll be sentenced to community service alongside Max Verstappen in Rwanda, but we have been hearing this nonsense as a reader for over three decades. Rivers of ink (and bytes) just to sell a few copies or garner a few more views. Based on personal experience, we can say one thing.
In a sector very akin to Formula 1, a project always inherits the strengths of its previous iteration. In common parlance, a new release of a product (whatever it may be) is conventionally labeled as completely new. This assumption applies to cars as well, since any evolutionary or corrective modification in one area inevitably triggers a domino effect on other parts of the vehicle. Based on this, the statement from the French manager executive takes on the correct connotation. It is evident that with the Ferrari SF-24 single-seater, the Maranello technicians and engineers could not go further without breaching the constraints of the budget cap.
The development of the car lasted much longer than in past years, an unmistakable sign that the technical path taken is finally the correct one. Logic dictates that the virtuous characteristics of a car should always be preserved. Moreover, the 2025 Formula 1 season represents the deadline of the current regulatory framework before the technical revolution set to take place for the 2026 championship, when the new cars will be designed based on completely different characteristics and technical features. Starting from the premise that the SF-24 single-seater, in the second half of the 2024 Formula 1 season, was at least the second-best car on the grid, why should a design philosophy from which potential has been extracted be completely abandoned?
Why should Ferrari shelve the paradigm of the SF-24 just when it is beginning to reap the rewards of its troubled development? The final year of regulatory continuity is theoretically perfect for teams with a solid technical project, allowing them to extract greater performance through the logical evolution of the previous season's car. With this approach, McLaren emerged from the quicksand of the first part of the 2023 season to become world champion just over 12 months later.
The MCL38 was not the result of a U-turn in design philosophy but the final release of an evolutionary process that began with the MCL60. That said, it is clear that Frederic Vasseur's statement regarding the Maranello team’s car for the next F1 campaign needs to be contextualized. At Ferrari, no one intends to adopt a completely different aerodynamic-mechanical paradigm from the one used on the SF-24 unless the engineers in Maranello have reached a worrying conclusion: that no further performance can be extracted from the aerodynamic philosophy of the 676 project. This is somewhat reminiscent of what happened with the RB20 this year.
From a stellar car at the beginning of the season to one with capped performance, despite significant updates made to Adrian Newey's latest project after the Hungarian Grand Prix at the Hungaroring circuit. Unlike the Milton Keynes team, however, the departure of Ferrari's technical director, Italian aerodynamicist Enrico Cardile, did not have negative repercussions. This was demonstrated by the reaction of the Maranello team's engineers and technicians, who, despite losing their Italian leader, managed to turn the season around after the failed aerodynamic update package related to the floor which was introduced in the Spanish Grand Prix weekend at the Circuit de Catalunya in Barcelona.
An aerodynamic update which, as we have repeatedly highlighted in recent months, stemmed from a misleading hypothetical context. Incidentally, according to well-informed sources, the "experimental floor," initially designed solely for data correlation in preparation for a more advanced component on Project 677, was instead used during the Qatar Grand Prix, enabling Charles Leclerc to achieve a brilliant second-place finish at the Lusail International Circuit. Therefore, beware of sellers of percentages and smoke who love to decontextualize or embellish certain points. Often, logic and reason suggest exactly the opposite.
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