Scuderia Ferrari ran a new floor on Carlos Sainz’s car in FP1 in Las Vegas on Thursday, but only as a wind tunnel correlation exercise – and it won’t be used for the rest of the weekend.
The appearance of a revised floor on the FIA’s list of new aero parts for Vegas suggested that the team might been attempting to find a valuable performance boost for the final three races, but that is not the case.
The fact that the team made the effort to design and construct the floor for use in a single session is a good indication of how valuable the information that it provided is deemed to be.
It was not supposed to provide any performance gain, and Sainz finished the session in sixth place, two-tenths behind team mate Charles Leclerc.
“It’s simply a development part, and actually it’s a correlation process,” said senior performance engineer Jock Clear. “So it’s a floor that we only have one of, and Carlos will run it in FP1.
“And basically it’s not bringing more performance. It’s just specifically different in one certain area, and that area is the area we want to look at in terms of correlation with what the tunnel is telling us.
“So it’s a bit like when you have these issues on the car, and you’re trying to work your way around which bit of the floor is affecting corner entry, or mid corner/apex understeer, or whatever, you need to really be very specific about which parts of the floor are going to make the difference.
“And actually, that’s quite a difficult process. So one of the things that it’s quite valuable to do occasionally is to bring a part that’s specifically very, very targeted, and say, ‘Okay, does that do what we think it’ll do?’
“So it won’t make the car any quicker, it won’t give him any more downforce, but we need to look at the numbers and say, yes, when we did that, that’s the result we’ve got. And that’s a correlation process for the tunnel.”
Clear conceded that by helping to hone the wind tunnel the new floor will feed into the 2025 development programme.
“I think next year’s cars, obviously there’s not a great big rule change, nothing particularly dramatic,” said Clear. “So they will, to a large extent, be a development of what teams already have. And that’s probably the case for us as well.
“So everything you’re doing at the moment is obviously enhancing your learning for what will probably end up on a ’25 car.
“And again, which probably comes back to this floor that we’re bringing for FP1 here, there are things that you specifically are thinking, okay, we’re going to run out of time.
“We’ve only got three races left, and we really need to understand this particular aspect, because we think that’s important for next year.
“So there are these things that you can target in these last three races to say this is our last opportunity. It’s not like we have a winter of testing like we used to do 20 years ago.
“Testing won’t arrive until February, so we’ve really got to identify on this car the areas that we think are going to be very pertinent for next year. So that’s part of our process.”
Expanding on the effort required to bring the floor to Las Vegas he said: “I think we’ve been quite open in effectively being public about the fact that we brought this floor, and I think you’ll probably find teams do this all the time.
“Obviously a floor is a big part, and actually you have to make a commitment, because it’s an expensive part as well. So it’s not the kind of thing you’re going to do every week.
“But there are bits on the car that are developments and correlating things that are on the car every week, little sensors and little fins on the front brake ducts and things like that.
“So the fact that we’ve obviously put some effort into bringing a floor here, it’s an important correlation, and we certainly think if it gives us the information we want, then yeah, it’s worth doing. That’s why we’re doing it.”
Adam Cooper F1 