FERRARI CONTROLS BOUNCING ISSUES AFTER IDENTIFYING WIND TUNNEL ANOMALY
A floor update at Barcelona added a high-speed bouncing problem to Ferrari’s 2024 Formula 1 car.
Ferrari believes it has overcome the bouncing issues, which senior performance engineer Jock Clear sees as part of the challenges posed by the current ground effect regulations. A floor update for the Spanish Grand Prix, introduced to build on the performance of the previous version debuted during the Imola weekend in May, instead triggered bouncing in the high-speed corners of the Barcelona circuit.
This led Ferrari to roll back the update for Silverstone, with the team revising the underbody geometry for the Hungarian weekend just before the summer break.
Ferrari had been following an upward trend, with Charles Leclerc securing pole position in Baku, and despite Carlos Sainz’s crash in Q3, the team looked promising before the incident derailed their weekend in Singapore.
Clear, explaining Ferrari’s process in identifying its issues, stated that the team needed to investigate the “anomaly” between the wind tunnel and track data before moving on to a new development path.
“You can never be fully certain, but I think this is a good picture of how everyone’s development goes through ups and downs,” Clear explained.
“But you probably ask the same question to other teams: ‘Have you lost your way?’
“And we certainly didn’t feel we’d lost our way after Spain, but there were some anomalies between what we saw in the tunnel and on the track that we needed to get on top of.
“This is just a process, when you see an anomaly, you have to chase it down, try to understand it, and then get back on track.”
“And I think what you’ve seen since then is that we’ve understood it, continued on our way, and we just need to keep our eyes open for what the next anomaly might be, because that’s the nature of the process now — there will be another one.”
“So, sometimes the update works, and it’s not that the updates don’t work, but the development process is about testing something new every week.
“We’re confident that our process is working, and that we have everything under control. We’re just waiting for the next banana peel.”
Clear explained the challenges of improving floor geometry under the current regulations, noting that wind tunnels become less effective when measuring a car in various dynamic conditions.
He said the biggest mitigating factor is the variation in ride height, as the differences in downforce production are magnified by small changes in the car’s height from the ground.
Clear added, “I think these challenges have arisen since we brought back ground effect cars. Simply put, if the car is far off the ground and the floor isn’t producing much downforce due to its distance from the track, the tunnel can be fairly accurate.
“But once you start understanding what happens over a kerb or when bouncing occurs, the tunnel can’t capture that.”
“We can bounce the car up and down. But of course, the data looks all mixed up. However, no matter how confusing the data looks on the track, the driver still has to deal with it.”
“There’s a certain level of correlation between the tunnel and the track, but achieving 100% accuracy is very difficult.”
“You’re always going to have these anomalies, and with ground effect, the anomalies are bigger because proximity to the ground quickly becomes more powerful.”
“When you hit zero, you lose all your downforce, and when you come back to five millimeters, you get a lot of downforce again, entering this very sharp area on the floor. And everyone is always fighting with that,” he explained.
