Ferrari is still seeking answers on whether its latest floor upgrades have turned its 2024 Formula 1 season around until heading to higher-downforce circuits.
The Italian squad brought a new floor to June's Barcelona round that induced bouncing problems in high-speed corners, which meant it had to revert to an older specification before applying some temporary fixes to mitigate the problem, seeing it slip down the pecking order.
In Monza Ferrari introduced its latest floor specification, which did appear to work as desired, with the squad in the mix at the front and Charles Leclerc even making a one-stop strategy work to defeat the McLarens and take an emotional win on Italian soil for the Scuderia.
"It’s quite difficult to understand the impact of the upgrade on a track like Monza, because we are in such a different configuration compared to the rest of the season," Ferrari team boss Fred Vasseur said.
"But at the end of the day, when you see the qualifying and you have six cars in less than one-tenth [two-tenths actually], every single bit makes the difference."
But crucially, the true test of whether the new Ferrari floor has eliminated high-speed bouncing will come on tracks with longer and faster high-downforce corners.
Monza didn't feature those, and neither do the upcoming street circuits of Baku and Singapore, so a definitive answer won't come before Austin's US Grand Prix in mid-October.
"We will need to wait for more normal tracks to see if this upgrade has really turned our season around and we're going to fight for wins from now on or we are going to go back to what we saw in Zandvoort," said Carlos Sainz, who finished off the podium in fourth.
"I'm honestly not sure. We need more samples on this new floor and we need to go to more normal tracks. I guess the next normal one is Austin because the ones coming up are very particular, Baku and Singapore. Austin will tell us how good we are with this new floor."
"In Baku there's not one single high-speed corner or medium-speed corner, it's all low-speed, very particular like Singapore. So I think we are not going to see how much we've improved the car in high-speed to medium-speed corners."
Leclerc was cautious too, feeling McLaren and Red Bull will still be a step ahead on more downforce dependent layouts.
"The upgrade definitely brought us closer to McLaren, but I don't think it's enough to be the car to beat for the rest of the season on other tracks," he said.
"Singapore maybe could be a strong track for us. On the other tracks, I still feel like we are a step behind McLaren and Red Bull. But we've seen that we can be very on a par with McLaren if we do everything perfect.
"We've done some steps forward. I think we need some others."
