Ferrari senior performance engineer Jock Clear has outlined the root of the Scuderia's upgrade problems earlier in the F1 season - and why he is confident it will not happen again.
Ferrari senior performance engineer Jock Clear has explained what caused the Italian to struggle with the upgrades it introduced earlier in the season.
Having successfully brought updates to Imola, winning the subsequent race in Monaco, the Scuderia ported further developments two rounds later, at the Spanish Grand Prix.
However, both Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz immediately found difficulties in the package, notably an increase in bouncing.
This led to the belief that, as has often been the case for many teams under the current ground-effect regulations, Ferrari had taken a wrong turn in its development path.
Clear pointed out that the upgrades did return the expected step forward in downforce, but the occurrence of bouncing prevented the Maranello squad from translating that to improved performance and gains in lap time on track.
Whilst Ferrari did ultimately have to shelve part of that package and build back to the specification used in its most recent victory, in Monza, the root of the issue was the inherent difficulty in correlating the modelling of developments with their real-world counterparts.
"Because it's only something that manifests itself when you actually get in the real car, it's very difficult to model," Clear explained to media including RacingNews365.
"So the more you see of it, and basically the more track time you get, the more correlation you can get.
"I would say we're comfortable with having correlated better what we're seeing.
"Obviously we're not comfortable with the fact that some of our upgrades have been compromised somewhat by that bouncing.
"And the drivers have found that it's got the downforce, but it's really difficult to actually drive the car when that bouncing starts to initiate."
