In an attempt to boost itself up the field, Ferrari have bought an upgrade package a race earlier to the Steiermark grand prix – so what’s changed"
CREDIT: XPB Images

The Ferrari SF1000 arrived at pre-season testing with a tightly packaged rear end, redesigned suspension and modifications to the internal combustion architecture, along with many aero tweaks. Yet the cars were not as competitive as Ferrari had hoped for, with a disparity in the correlation between track performance and factory simulations.
?The car in winter testing was not performing as let me say the design we did at home so there was a mis-correlation from design to track,? reveals Mattia Binotto, Team Principal at Ferrari. ?We started really trying to understand it as soon as we have been back at the factory, so during the shutdown period that was not possible. I think we realized that from the aero point of view mainly there were some miss-correlations. Eventually I think we pushed our project on trying to seek a lot of downforce.? Achieving a more efficiently packaged rear end was a development focus of the SF1000 over the winter. CREDIT: XPB Images

Another problem was the robustness of the aerodynamic design, which is something the team will look to improve as part of the Ferrari SF1000 upgrade. ?I think whatever we developed was too fragile in terms of aero robustness when being back on track and what we are trying to do now is to have a step bac...