Mark Hughes, a technical expert on the official website of the championship, who analyzed the design of the new Ferrari car, drew attention to both the new features and the similarities with last year’s chassis.
Although Enrico Cardile, technical director of Ferrari, claims so. While the SF-24 is very different from the 2022 and 2023 cars, many features of the new chassis look very familiar.
Another aerodynamic concept that Cardile mainly talks about is that Maranello decided to move away from the previous configuration of the front part of the side pontoons, deflecting the airflow towards the sides of the car. The pontoons now have a more traditional shape with a bevel at the bottom. However, this is precisely the external change associated with a different approach to the distribution of currents under the bottom of the car.
Because the safety structures that absorb side impact energy are positioned lower, the front of the sidepods protrudes much more forward than last year’s car. In addition, the lower edges of the radiator air intakes, located above the chamfer at the bottom of the pontoons, have also now been extended forward, as on last year’s Red Bull car.
The profile of the side pontoons is more inclined than the SF-23, but the angle of inclination of their upper surface is still not as steep as the new cars from other teams that we have already seen. There is also no characteristic groove on this surface.
The nose is wide, just like last year, and the car also retains the same suspension configuration: pushrods at the front, rods at the rear. However, there are minor changes: the angles of the upper wishbones are slightly different, which is done to increase resistance to the tilt of the nose of the car and sagging of the rear part.
As far as we can understand, the gearbox housing has been shortened by about 5 cm (while the chassis length has been increased by exactly the same amount to maintain the same overall length). This frees up additional space around the diffuser, allowing aerodynamicists to implement more efficient solutions.
The airflow, which travels along the edges of the bottom and interacts with the significantly more sloping side pontoons, is guided at a higher speed to the area around the diffuser, making the bottom work more efficiently. All this is also connected to the Venturi tunnels under the floor of the car, which the Ferrari engineers certainly tried to give the optimal shape.
Increasing the energy of the currents passing through these tunnels is a key factor affecting the efficiency of the chassis as a whole. These flows must be stable enough to ensure normal underbody operation at different speeds and at different stages of cornering. Ferrari hopes to overcome a trend from last year where downforce at the rear of the car can drop sharply at high speeds, making it difficult for drivers to drive at the limit.
Cardile emphasized that when creating a new chassis, the developers tried to take into account as much as possible the comments of Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz – this approach was used in the Scuderia at the end of last season, which made it possible to increase the competitiveness of the car to increase. If the team had these kinds of priorities in mind when developing the SF-24, then in theory there’s a chance that Ferrari is indeed on track to achieve its goals.
Source: F1 News
I am Christopher Clyde, an experienced journalist and content writer with a passion for sports. I have been writing about Formula 1 news for the past five years and am currently employed as an author at athletistic.com, one of the top sports websites in the US.
