Ferrari feels it’s got on prime of its 2024 Components 1 automobile bouncing points, which senior efficiency engineer Jock Clear believes is just a part of the challenges offered by the present ground-effect laws.
A flooring improve for the Spanish Grand Prix promised to construct on the efficiency supplied by the earlier iteration launched at Might’s Imola spherical, however as an alternative triggered bouncing within the high-speed corners on the Barcelona circuit.
This led Ferrari to roll again on the brand new flooring for Silverstone and the workforce revised its underbody geometry for the Hungary spherical forward of the summer season break.
Ferrari confirmed renewed vigour in Baku which led to Charles Leclerc taking pole, and seemed promising in Singapore earlier than Carlos Sainz’s Q3 crash slightly derailed the workforce’s weekend.
Explaining the method of figuring out the workforce’s points, Clear mentioned the workforce wanted to research the “anomaly” between the wind tunnel and the circuit earlier than it moved to a brand new improvement course.
“You are by no means absolutely assured – however I feel it is a good image of how the ebb and circulation of everyone’s improvement goes,” Clear defined.
“However you are most likely asking the identical inquiries to [other teams] – have you ever misplaced your means? And definitely after Spain, we did not really feel we would misplaced our means, however there was some anomaly between what was occurring within the tunnel and what we have been seeing on observe, and we needed to get on prime of that.

Charles Leclerc, Ferrari SF-24, leads Fernando Alonso, Aston Martin AMR24
Picture by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Photographs
“That is simply the method; once you see an anomaly, it’s important to get on prime of it, attempt to perceive it, after which get again on observe.
“I feel what you’ve got seen since is that we have understood it, we received again on observe, we simply need to be eyes vast open for what the subsequent anomaly will likely be, as a result of there will likely be one other one as a result of that’s the course of in the mean time.
“So it isn’t that generally the event works, generally these developments do not work: the event course of is precisely that you’re testing one thing new each week.
“We’re assured that our course of is working, assured that we’re on prime of all the pieces. We’ll simply await the subsequent banana pores and skin.”
Clear defined the challenges of creating flooring geometry with the present laws, explaining that the wind tunnel’s efficacy is diminished in relation to measuring a automobile in varied dynamic circumstances.
He says that the variations in flooring peak are the important thing mitigating issue, because the variations in downforce output are magnified by small modifications in trip peak.
“I feel ever since we introduced these floor impact vehicles again, it is offered challenges which have… in easy phrases, when the automobile’s a good distance from the ground and the ground shouldn’t be producing enormous quantities of downforce based mostly on its proximity to the ground, then the tunnel might be fairly correct.

Carlos Sainz, Ferrari SF-24
Picture by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Photographs
“However as quickly as you get into what’s occurring over a kerb, what’s occurring once you’re bouncing, the tunnel cannot try this.
“We will bounce the automobile up and down. However after all, the information then seems to be a large number. However nonetheless a lot the information seems to be a large number on observe, the motive force has to drive it.
“There is a sure stage of correlation between the tunnel and the observe, that it is troublesome that you just’re ever going to get 100% constancy.
“You are all the time going to have these anomalies and with the bottom impact, the anomalies are larger as a result of that proximity to the bottom turns into all of the extra highly effective as quickly because it.
“When it will get to zero, you lose all of your downforce, And when it comes again as much as 5 millimetres, you get a great deal of downforce and also you get into this actually peaky space on the ground. And everyone’s challenged with that on a regular basis.”