Ferrari SF71H
Last year’s SF70H has proved to be one of the most influential designs of recent years, with almost every team now adopting its innovation of separating the side impact structure from the sidepod, allowing those pods to begin farther back. By increasing the distance between front axle and sidepod, this allows more space for the various airflow-accelerating vanes in that area. Not only does that increase downforce directly, but in speeding up the flow to the radiators it allows the inlets to be smaller.
The SF71H has retained the same basic philosophy but within a longer wheelbase. This has been achieved by a combination of moving the front axle forwards, away from the cockpit (as can be seen by how much longer the vanes are) and the rear axle farther back (thereby increasing the area of the downforce-inducing underfloor). Changing the distance between front axle and sidepod will have totally changed the airflow regime, so this is a major reworking. Reflecting this is a front wing of very different design from last year’s, placing the vortices in different places down the car, as required.
Intimately related to the sidepod openings are the front suspension wishbones. Ferrari has retained the very high radiator inlets – another influential feature of last year’s car – and standard-height wishbones, allowing the air headed for the inlets a route above the suspension. The alternative is to mount the wishbones high and the inlets low to form a route beneath the suspension. Those inlets have shrunk even from last year and are no longer letterbox in shape.
The wheelbase increase has allowed the sidepod treatment to be more extreme. They are now much narrower at the top, though slightly wider beneath, so there is now less of an undercut but a more extreme teardrop shape in plan-view as the line pushes out farther from the narrower openings. This implies less acceleration of air past the lower part of the sidepods, but more past the upper part. This was probably driven by two things – the relocation of internal components to lower the c of g and Ferrari’s aerodynamicists finding that the ideal compromise changed with the increase in distance between front axle and sidepod.
Split view – SF71H above, SF70H below. Sidepod’s narrower top leading edge has made for an enhanced teardrop shape at the front in plan view, the bodywork coming farther out before swooping back in. Extreme coke bottle profile from mid-riff to rear is retained, inducing a pressure change that accelerates the airflow. Alan Jenkins introduced this concept in the 1980s, at McLaren. The coke bottle comes inside the central stepped bottom floor section, allowing a 5cm deep channel (not visible here) to run adjacent to the sidepod from there to the top of the diffuser, increasing airflow speed
Split view – SF71H above, SF70H below. Sidepod’s narrower top leading edge has made for an enhanced teardrop shape at the front in plan view, the bodywork coming farther out before swooping back in. Extreme coke bottle profile from mid-riff to rear is retained, inducing a pressure change that accelerates the airflow. Alan Jenkins introduced this concept in the 1980s, at McLaren. The coke bottle comes inside the central stepped bottom floor section, allowing a 5cm deep channel (not visible here) to run adjacent to the sidepod from there to the top of the diffuser, increasing airflow speed