Scuderia Ferrari will introduce its first major upgrade of the season during next weekend’s Spanish Grand Prix to make up for the roughly 0.2-second advantage of the current Red Bull car.
So far this season, Ferrari and Red Bull have taken different development paths. Since the first round of testing, the Ferrari car’s floor has not undergone major upgrades, while Red Bull is using a new floor for the second round of testing in Bahrain, and has been working on aerodynamic package upgrades and weight reduction upgrades.
Scuderia Ferrari team boss Binotto has pointed out that Red Bull’s upgrade will speed up its spending towards the budget cap, but he knows that “only continuous research and development can keep up with Red Bull’s speed.”
Ferrari will introduce a new floor plate during the Spanish Grand Prix, designed to lower the dolphin jump while allowing the car to drop even further. The F1-75 is good enough in single-lap qualifying, but is slightly inferior to the lighter RB18 on long distances. Binotto expects Red Bull’s upgrade at Imola to create a lap advantage of about 0.2 seconds. Ferrari needed to try to understand why their straight-line advantage didn’t translate into a lap advantage. When paired with the medium tyres, the Red Bull’s performance in the low-speed corners is on par with the Ferrari’s on the soft tyres.
(koala)
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