Ferrari has brought a raft of upgrades to this weekend’s Formula 1 Austrian Grand Prix, all of which are located on its much-maligned floor, a key area which has affected it in 2025.
The Scuderia has suffered throughout this season in terms of performance, a significant portion of which can be attributed towards this particular area of the SF-25.
This particular generation of F1 car relies on lower running to optimise the ground effect, which is its cornerstone, therefore rendering the SF-25 a harder car to set up.
It has caused the team to run it at ride heights that are significantly higher than what it would ideally like, which has seen a great deal of suffering in qualifying, in particular.
This has been summarised by Charles Leclerc, who said that this causes the team to find an optimum window in qualifying, which, in turn, naturally hampers a potential race result.
“I think putting the tyre in the right window is always more and more difficult,” said Leclerc. “Maybe on that, we are missing something but overall our car limitations are making it in a way that, when you are pushing to the absolute limit in qualifying, we struggle a bit more than when you have to do tyre management in the race – where this is our strength.”
When ridden lower, it has shown some increase in performance, including in China when Lewis Hamilton took his maiden Ferrari victory in the Sprint Race.
But Hamilton was disqualified for excessive plank wear in the main Grand Prix, and in the subsequent races, the car was forced to run higher than desired.
Leclerc cautious on Ferrari improvement
The pre-race technical notes in the FIA’s upgrades list state that “this floor package features updated front floor fences targeting an enhanced vorticity released downstream.
“The reshaped boat and tunnel expansion have been subsequently reoptimised, together with the floor edge loading and diffuser volume distribution, leading to an overall load gain across the car operating envelope”.
Ferrari’s floor ‘edge wing’ is one area that has been given a facelift, with what appears to be a lower profile, altering the intake of air, which it hopes will increase the ground effect, therefore improving its overall performance.
But after FP2 on Friday, Leclerc was quick to exercise caution on any potential excitement that the changes would immediately show a significant improvement.
“It doesn’t feel like the performance is quite there yet, but hopefully we will put everything together tomorrow and do a step forward, but there’s quite a lot of work to be done tonight,” he said.
“Long run [pace] seems to be more positive as we very often have – we are faster on the race [pace] than we are in Qualifying. In Qualifying there’s a lot of work to be done.”
Leclerc added: “Our race pace is very positive. We were, I would say, [setting] very similar lap times to the fastest guys, so that’s good, but the problem is that we’ve seen recently that everything is so close, and as soon as you start P6, P7, then in the race it’s extremely difficult to come back where you should be.”
Many might see the four floor changes as a silver bullet to bring Ferrari such maximisation that it will automatically compete further at the front, but Leclerc was quick to quell any unrealistic excitement.
“It’s very difficult for me to say any comments because I think people outside expect that, as a driver, you just go with the new part and ‘boom!’ it’s straightaway so much faster and it feels like a much faster car,” he quipped.
“But we are still speaking about very fine gains. Even if we say five tenths, which is huge, it’s very little per corner and if you didn’t do FP1 and you didn’t have a reference, it’s very difficult to feel. But number-wise, it does what it’s expected to do, and I’m happy with that. We’ll see.”
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