Formula 1 saw increased pressure on Ferrari after the Miami GP. Even bringing the largest upgrade package on the grid to the stage in the United States, the Italian team left the race without showing clear performance improvement.
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Lewis Hamilton finished only sixth, while Charles Leclerc was eighth after a complicated race. The Monegasque even led on the first lap but lost performance throughout the race, spun on the final lap, and also received a twenty-second penalty for exceeding track limits on several occasions.
The result drew attention especially because Ferrari brought eleven upgrades to Miami after a five-week break in the calendar. Former race engineer of the team and known for his work alongside Felipe Massa, Rob Smedley believes the scenario could be worrying for the development of the SF-26.
“It’s a bit morale-destroying because it creates a negative cycle from a technical point of view,” Smedley said on the High Performance Racing Podcast. “You start trying to understand what brought it, what works and what doesn’t work.” According to him, the biggest risk is that there is a difference between the data seen in the wind tunnel and the actual behavior of the car on the track.
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Leclerc also expressed concern about tire degradation during the Miami race and asked Ferrari to investigate the loss of performance shown at Hard Rock Stadium. Hamilton, for his part, had his race compromised early on after a touch with Franco Colapinto and finished more than fifty seconds behind the winner Kimi Antonelli.
Smedley warned that if the correlation between simulation and track is wrong, Ferrari could waste precious development time trying to find the source of the problem. “You enter a reverse engineering process, go back to the wind tunnel, and that locks all the development that should be done to make the car faster,” he explained. The Briton also recalled that wind tunnel and CFD time is limited by Formula 1 aerodynamic regulations, making the problem even more critical for the Italian team.
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