Ferrari has brought an upgraded floor to Formula 1’s Italian Grand Prix in a bid to help cure the bouncing problems that have held the team back in recent races.
A new floor design that arrived at the Spanish Grand Prix triggered a difficult spell for the Maranello-based squad as it triggered a return of high-speed bouncing.
An evolution of that concept was delivered in Hungary and the further changes brought to Monza should, the Scuderia hopes, help it finally start making some progress again.
Ferrari performance engineer Jock Clear said that the key to stopping bouncing was in controlling the final millimetre of movement when the car is sucked down close to the track as it generates more and more downforce - a "trap" that many teams have fallen into.
“In the past, cars would always bounce off the ground,” he said. “But the plank was there, plus we weren’t relying on that final bit of ground effect that this generation of cars are relying on. So, it would bounce off the ground but the aero was never that critical.
“These cars have ground effect, and have had for the last couple of years. That simply means that when the car does touch the ground, [the downforce] all disappears. So, you really have to be careful how aggressive that downforce is in those last couple of millimetres.
“It's part of this genre of car, and it is something that is a trap that we've fallen into earlier in this season. But we're modelling it better now. We're much more confident that we are now going to be able to produce floors that we don't find a problem [with] when we actually put them on the real car.”
What is new on the Ferrari at Monza
As well as the new floor, Ferrari has delivered a host of changes to its SF-24, including front and rear wings and sidepod tweaks.
The new low-downforce rear wing is an all-new design, with the team having simply used the same specification last season as it did in 2022.
The design now fits into the same family as the rest of the wings in its suite of solutions, with just one centrally mounted support pillar.
As with its other downforce variants, the wing is supported at the crash structure end with a semi-circular structure that wraps around the exhaust.
The swan neck-style connection at the top of the pylon still connects to the DRS pod, but rather than creating an arch above the mainplane, it now merges with it to provide additional support.
As expected for a wing designed for Monza, the mainplane and top flap occupy a much smaller percentage of the allowable box region than its counterparts.
This is even more so than the 2022/23 variants, as the mainplane has been flattened out further and a tighter radius preferred where it meets the endplate.
The semi-detached tip section used on the other wings in this year’s family of solutions has also been adopted this time around, with the rear endplate cutout and shape of the tip section modified to extract the most performance from the layout.
The rear wing is not the only way that Ferrari is going to reduce downforce and drag this weekend though, with a single-element beam wing also being employed by the Scuderia.
The front wing has undergone a more simplistic overhaul for Monza, as the team is simply looking to balance the car front to rear and opted to do so by adjusting the height of the wing’s upper flaps.
To cater for this, the trailing edge of the upper flap has been trimmed, whilst the angle of attack of the flaps will be altered to suit the drivers' requirements.
Ferrari last made a significant update to its sidepods at the Spanish Grand Prix, having previously switched to the overbite inlet solution and new bodywork a few races earlier at Imola.
As is normally the case with these bodywork changes, there were also alterations to the floor, edge wing and diffuser, all of which seemingly gave a net performance gain but resulted in a more inconsistent delivery than the previous configuration.
Ferrari is hoping that this latest update will resolve some of those issues and provide a more consistent platform moving forward.
Before we get into the bigger changes, there are two other small changes have been made to the SF-24 to improve flow from front to rear.
The nose cameras have been repositioned to better align with the suspension elements thereafter, whilst the outer wing mirror stay has also been shortened in order to work more effectively with the new sidepod bodywork.
This new bodywork incorporates a larger undercut and adjusts the size of depth of the bodywork beneath the beltline too, in order to increase the passage of flow to the rear of the car. This also further exposes the floor edge and edge wing, both of which have been fettled again too.
These alterations take advantage of the new floor fences ahead, which have been reprofiled and aligned, whilst the shapes of the boat tail and diffuser have also been heavily reconstructed.
The forward edge of the floor has been modified alongside the alterations made to the tail section of the floor fences, whilst the edge wing is similar in overall concept to its forebear, but its geometry has been altered by the inclusion of a cutout in the midsection.
The metal support brackets that act as the bridge between the floor’s edge and edge wing have also been repositioned and redesigned in order to tie in with the changes and offer an efficient balance between support and flexion.
