Ferrari started the 2024 Formula 1 season as Red Bull’s closest challenger, but it’s clear that’s no longer the case.
Currently, it is Lando Norris and McLaren who are putting the most pressure on Max Verstappen, but Ferrari does not have the pace to join the fight and also looks vulnerable to Mercedes.
If the final race is anything to go by, Ferrari appears well on its way to becoming the fourth best team in F1, judging by its result at last weekend’s Spanish Grand Prix.
It’s still incredibly close, of course – the battle at the front of the grid has never been more intense since F1 adopted hybrid engines in 2014 – but the worrying thing for Ferrari is that they’ve too often missed that small but crucial margin.
After a disappointing Spanish Grand Prix, which saw Ferrari drivers collide with each other, have tense post-race arguments and finish more than 20 seconds behind the winner, it was clear that Ferrari’s performance levels had not lived up to expectations.
Charles Leclerc said Ferrari “did not perform as expected” in Spain and urged the team to respond as soon as possible.
Carlos Sainz seemed equally disappointed with Ferrari’s current state. He believes the team should have definitely been fighting for pole position in Spain and should not have qualified three-and-a-half tenths behind McLaren and Red Bull, which, in his words, is “a pretty big lap time in Barcelona.”
Sainz, who topped the final practice session, had expected to be a tenth or one-and-a-half tenths of a second behind both cars in qualifying, and was clearly missing at least half a second in performance, surprising Ferrari.
There is also a slight disconnect between how the drivers feel about Ferrari’s position and how Ferrari itself feels.
Team principal Fred Vasseur, perhaps unsurprisingly, offered a more favourable outlook. He pointed to the fact that a half-second difference would have put both Ferraris ahead of Mercedes on the grid – which Vasseur said amounted to a “gust of wind” that would affect the cars at crucial moments – and from there, a podium fight would be much more likely, with the theoretical gap to the leading cars smaller.
Vasseur is somewhat fixated on the fact that Ferrari recently won the Monaco Grand Prix and Mercedes was “14 seconds behind” Ferrari, and believes performance profiles between the top teams can still vary widely.
His argument is that the performance patterns of F1’s top teams are “not clear” at the moment, but that Ferrari’s best performance so far in 2024 has been achieved at Monaco, which he says is the ultimate outlier circuit and not one to stick to if they want to be seen as a credible championship contender.
What is becoming clear is that Ferrari is on the losing side in the fierce battle at the front.
Are Ferrari’s upgrades enough?
Ferrari brought some highly publicised upgrades to Imola but they didn’t seem to make much of a difference in terms of their position relative to Red Bull, and they certainly looked less impressive than what McLaren had achieved with their car at that stage of the season.
At Barcelona, Ferrari introduced further upgrades, focusing on the rear wing, sidepods and floor, with the explicit aim of increasing downforce at the rear of the car and then maintaining more of it as the car goes through corners.
Ferrari’s Jock Clear said the package was making early progress in development and the extra performance could help Ferrari gain an advantage over its rivals in the three consecutive races from Barcelona to Silverstone.
Clear described the upgrades as “incremental” — increasing downforce and reducing drag — and the efficiency gains are “all-around winning.”
Both drivers were clear that these upgrades are bringing the expected performance boost, but the question is whether Ferrari is doing enough: F1 is always a relative game, so you can improve against yourself, but it’s meaningless if others are progressing at a faster pace.
Current trends suggest that Red Bull is beginning to reach the limits of its development due to these regulations, which is creating a welcome convergence at the front row of the grid, with teams like McLaren and Mercedes currently progressing at a better pace than Ferrari.
In Canada Ferrari’s response was a total nightmare, and in Spain Leclerc said Ferrari’s performance was “not as good as we expected” despite the rapid introduction of updated parts.
Vasseur sees the issue from the other end of the spectrum, noting that Ferrari’s incremental development up to 2024 is crucial to avoid losing competitiveness – in his words, not updating would mean “going backwards”.
But that’s a strangely defensive approach to the competition, and even if he’s right that Ferrari might be able to get more out of the car with a better understanding of the new package applied in future races, it ignores the fact that no matter how little progress they are making with the car, Ferrari seems to be going backwards.
McLaren overtakes Ferrari
It’s natural to wonder whether Ferrari’s standards for what is still possible under these regulations are weak.
In F1 there is always variation in performance from race to race, every car has characteristics that suit certain circuits better than others and it all comes down to how well you can deliver on a given weekend in terms of execution and maximising your potential.
But if you want to be in the fight for the championship and maximise your potential throughout the season, you need to be active on as wide a range of circuits as possible.
One of the reasons for McLaren’s incredible success is the fact that the team has overhauled methodologies that in the past had warned against pursuing certain development directions, and are now proving fruitful.
Mercedes’ James Allison said the development limits in F1 are fundamentally different to what they were before: the track imposes a hard limit that everyone must strive for, and the lower you are on the track, the more stable the car can be, and the greater the increase in downforce.
However, getting into that territory creates difficult balancing constraints for all teams, so front wing flexibility is now becoming a hot topic.
If we could design the front wing to stall at high speed, and then have the airflow reattach predictably on deceleration, we could improve front end grip in slow corners, without the front wing overpowering in ground effect and compromising rear stability at high speed.
Similarly, if you push too hard into the exponential curve of downforce generation from the floor, the rear of the car can be subjected to too much force, causing the car to bounce to pieces and be unable to corner properly in any but the gentlest or most progressive high-speed turns.
Maintaining the stability of that aerodynamic profile through any kind of corner is extremely difficult, and the level of mechanical rigidity required to control that aerodynamic platform creates significant problems when going over bumps and curbs.
Currently, the leader in F1 is Red Bull, a team that is extremely good at performing at high speeds with high efficiency (low drag), but struggles when the circuit is extremely uneven, as they have to deviate from the ideal ride height range to meet the challenge, which results in a loss of downforce.
Mercedes has finally figured out how to achieve the right balance between low-speed and high-speed performance, while sacrificing slightly the level of peak downforce it can generate at either end of that spectrum. The improved and more flexible front wings introduced in Monaco and Canada were an important step in balancing the characteristics of a car that was previously too biased towards either end of the spectrum.
Ferrari has worked hard to make its cars less peaky and easier to drive, but it has probably followed a similar path of not being too greedy in chasing peak downforce from the lower ride height range, and instead willing to sacrifice some of the theoretical gains in exchange for greater stability and driveability.
This gives Ferrari clear overall improvements from 2023 to 2024, but its greater mechanical flexibility than other top cars means it sacrifices platform control fidelity at high speeds and remains prone to being underpowered on slow circuits with short corners.
This car’s power unit configuration also gives it much better exit speed out of slow corners, but at the expense of top-end performance at the end of long straights.
This is reflected in Ferrari’s relatively uncompetitive nature at circuits with long corners and high speeds, such as Jeddah, Suzuka, Shanghai and Barcelona, but its much better performance at circuits such as Bahrain, Melbourne and especially Monaco.
And it performs at reasonable but not exceptional levels at places like Imola and Miami, where bumps, kerbs and short corners help but long, full-throttle, high-speed sections don’t.
But McLaren seems to have produced a genuine all-rounder.
A car with strong high-speed capability, though not as good as the Red Bull, at the expense of extra aerodynamic drag and absolute straight-line speed, but with enough mechanical dexterity and flexibility to get over bumps and kerbs at low speeds, though not as good as the Ferrari, and with a wider overall maneuvering range than the Mercedes.
Ferrari: King of the outliers
What Ferrari has is what might currently be called the king of the mavericks: a car that is extremely powerful on circuits with a very specific and narrow performance profile like Monaco, but noticeably (but never dramatically) underperforming on more conventional tracks.
Vasseur seems willing to accept that compromise if it means Ferrari can win in places like Monaco (which it has already done), Baku or Singapore, which he suggested “wouldn’t be so bad”.
He wanted to highlight the fact after the Spanish Grand Prix that four different cars have taken pole position in each of the last four races, making it impossible to determine a clear pecking order.
He also feels strongly that the centralisation seen at the front of the grid ensures that emphasis is placed on the smallest variations in circuit characteristics to suit particular cars, encouraging teams to perform to the best of their ability in any given session and to seize even the slightest shortfalls in performance that might otherwise be caught out.
The Ferrari felt a bit under-controlled at high speeds around Barcelona, at full grip and maximum power, and was also unsuited to long cornering sessions, resulting in bouncing limits in the highest corners and what appeared to be understeer limits in the lowest corners.
Perhaps they had to run a bit higher than ideal to gain some control and therefore couldn’t maintain the same speed through the full range of corners as McLaren and Red Bull could. Maintaining speed through the final two fast right-handers was particularly limiting for Ferrari in Spain.
It’s also possible that the latest upgrades overpowered the rear of the car a bit, pushing the Ferrari into bouncy territory and creating an imbalance that resulted in some speed-sapping understeer that couldn’t be completely eliminated this time around.
Sainz said Ferrari’s “hope” is that Barcelona will simply be “a track we’re not good at” – Ferrari performed badly there in 2023, but fifth and sixth place finishes in 2024 arguably represent year-on-year improvement.
Vasseur’s approach is to call for calm after each race and not get too excited about Ferrari’s over- or under-performing results, but McLaren’s progress and understanding under these rules seems to be outpacing Ferrari.
And Ferrari is also in danger of regressing despite making gradual progress, with Sainz saying: “The other teams seem to be making more progress.”
As Sainz himself admits, McLaren and Red Bull appear to be clearly one step ahead with a wider range of corner profiles and circuit types than Ferrari can currently compensate for with its inherent strengths.
And the fact that Ferrari appears to have lost its advantage over McLaren at the start of 2024 should be ringing alarm bells in Maranello.
