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Ferrari finished third in last year’s constructors’ championship despite Carlos Sainz being the only non-Red Bull Racing driver to win a grand prix.
However, the SF-23 was a tricky car to drive and has prompted a change in philosophy at Maranello in terms of the underly design theory it employs.
That has seen it move towards a more ‘Red Bull’ style of design as the team reasoned there was greater development headroom down that track.
“There was a clear input which is the driveability of the 23 car, which was extremely sensitive to wind direction changes, to outside conditions, and that made it very difficult to extract the maximum out of the car,” Charles Leclerc said of his input into the development of the 2024 challenger.
“There has been a lot of work and based on the simulator we’ve done a significant step forward.”
Team boss Fred Vasseur added: “It’s always a compromise.
“If you look at last year and the season overall, for sure we had up and down. The global picture is we were competitive in qualifying and suffering more in the race, not sure it was only due to degradation but I would say more inconsistency.
“For sure, we had all our focus on the car had to be easier to drive and have less restriction. It’s where we are focused on and I think we did a decent step.”
Ferrari started the current era of ground effects cars strongly, heading both drivers’ and constructors’ championships in the first part of 2022.
However, operational issues hampered the team’s performance while mistakes from Leclerc allowed Max Verstappen and Red Bull Racing back into the title fight.
“The 2022 car concept was a good one but at the end of the day in terms of how far we could have gone with this concept, I mean, it was less than with the new concepts,” explained Enrico Cardile, Ferrari’s head of chassis.
“At the end of the day, it was just a matter of the peak of performance, you can reach with the other concept.
“So 2022 was a good car, providing good performance, very stable but when we started to add that downforce to the car…
“We strongly believe that the new concepts will allow us to go more far than the previous one.”
But it wasn’t simply a case of opening up development potential but addressing the concerns raised by Leclerc and Sainz.
There was also the fact that the SF-23 was hard on tyres in race trim.
“When we talk about drivability, part of the drivability is how easy is it extract the performance, which can be could be done with a light car, new tyres on one single lap but then becoming trickier and trickier while during the race as the tyres wear, the wind change and so on,”
“So the purpose of increasing the drivability of the car is to have a better performance also in the race.
“The intention will be to put together the two worlds, keeping having a competitive a car in quali, but with a platform more friendly, more exploitable, also during the race with a better performance in race.”
That has left a sense of cautious optimism in Maranello.
Without having done any proper running, and none with another team on track, the relative performance of the SF-24 is unknown.
“It’s not a matter to be happy with the development you made. At the end of the day, it’s a comparison,” Vasseur noted.
“If you gain two seconds, if the others are doing three, you look stupid.
“At the end of the day, the judgement will be based on comparison.
“At least on the simulator so far we fixed the biggest part of the issue that we had and we will see in Bahrain if we fixed everything or not.
“Then will be the question about pure performance.
“It will be another story, but we identified last year the biggest weaknesses and we work on it and we did a step on this.”
