Five concerning signs as Ferrari risk being demoted from the F1 2024 Championship podium

The second-fastest team in the opening rounds of F1 2024, Ferrari were heralded as the team to take the fight to Red Bull in the championships.

Today they’re facing the very real prospect of being demoted from the season’s podium.

Damning ‘not fast enough’ verdict

Front row starting positions and podiums were littered throughout Ferrari’s first eight races with China the only outlier, but still resulting in a P4 and P5 result.

But already in Miami, it looked as if a third team had entered the chat with Lando Norris bagging his first F1 win in the upgraded McLaren. That prompted a response from Ferrari who updated the SF-24 at Imola before winning the next race in Monaco.

Charles Leclerc’s victory at his home race not only erased all talk of a curse for the Monegasque local but it put Ferrari within a race victory from Red Bull in the points.

Six races later, and with between two and three months of development time lost when their Spanish GP parts failed to fire, Ferrari have not only fallen behind McLaren on the track – but also Mercedes.

“Compared to Mercedes, Red Bull, and McLaren, we are two or three-tenths behind,” Carlos Sainz said at Spa. “I felt competitive and fast, then when I heard the others’ times, I thought: ‘No, I’m not as fast as I would have liked’.”

Neither was Leclerc, who declared: “We were not fast enough. It seemed we were the fourth car, we expected McLaren and Red Bull, but Mercedes are faster than expected.

“Unfortunately, we are the fourth force. The top three keep changing, but we are there, at best on par with Mercedes.”

Porpoising has put Ferrari on the back foot

Worrying for Ferrari is the cause of their lack of pace – porpoising. The phenomenon returned with a vengeance at the Barcelona circuit when they introduced a new floor along with other upgrades.

But even rolling back on that in Austria, the bouncing was there.

Forced to decide per race which floor, the Spanish one, which improves the car’s speed but also intensifies the bouncing or the Imola one, which is not as quick but has less bouncing, Sainz says they cannot quantify how much the bouncing is costing them in lap time as it has a knock-on effect: the team has to make set-up changes to minimise it.

Team boss Fred Vasseur noted another effect it was having and that was on the drivers’ confidence with the car. Even if Ferrari bring other new parts that are worth lap time, if the bouncing is there the driver’s confidence takes a hit and a one-tenth step forward is negated by “three-tenths” back, leaving them in a “negative” performance balance.

The bouncing cannot be simulated in the wind tunnel as it occurs in high-speed corners, meaning it’s extremely difficult to get a handle on without basically taking away downforce.

Just ask Mercedes. The Brackley squad grappled with bouncing for most of the first two seasons of F1’s ground-effect aerodynamic cars. It required a massive change in direction to minimise the issue and regain lost downforce but even today the drivers report “bouncing” at some tracks.

Even minimising it on track during a Grand Prix weekend isn’t easy, as Vasseur explains: “The issue is that when bouncing is not under control I think it’s quite impossible to simulate the bouncing also because you can see from session to session when the wind changes direction or whatever, that one thing can appear or disappear.”

Ferrari missed out on the man that ‘sees air’

Alas Ferrari’s best solution to the porpoising problem would’ve been to sign Adrian Newey, the man that “sees air”.

The design guru at the helm when Red Bull designed their championship-destroying ground-effect aerodynamic cars with their “insane” rear-ends, Newey studied ground effect as an aerodynamic phenomenon while at university and it was the subject of his last motorsport project during his studies.

A widely-held belief that Newey is worth more than a driver’s salary to any team with his 25 championship titles, and potentially two more to come, the Briton was almost immediately linked to Ferrari when it was announced on 1st May that he’d be leaving Red Bull next year.

But as the rumours rumbled on, whispers of a secret meeting in Maranello and another at an airport, no confirmation was forthcoming and today it is being said the bidding war for Newey, coupled with his desire to work part-time, have put an end to him joining Ferrari.

That’s not just an issue because they lost out on the man who “sees air”, they also no longer have a technical director of chassis.

Earlier this month long-time chassis technical chief Enrico Cardile left Ferrari to join Aston Martin, where he will step into his new role in 2025, but as yet Ferrari have not replaced him.

In the meantime, team boss Vasseur, despite the immense over-worked-load that job alone entails, has stepped in on an interim basis.

“But just after the summer break,” he said. “We will announce the new organisation. At the end of the day, we have a group of more than 200 people working on these cars, and with 200 people, one person [leaving] is not always a drama.”

Pressed on details about the new chassis boss, he coyly replied: “I have a couple of names with five letters.”

Newey may be five letters but it’s being reported that ship is setting sail for Aston Martin along with Cardile.

Loic Serra, who will join Ferrari from Mercedes on 1st October, could top the list of candidates but today he has no experience with the SF-24 – although he does have a lot of knowhow about porpoising from his time with Mercedes.

But if Vasseur brings in as yet un-signed help from the outside, Red Bull’s Pierre Wache, once rumoured to be a target along with Enrico Balbo, they’ll first have to sit through gardening leave meaning they’ll have no impact on today’s SF-24 nor the inception of the 2025 car.

The 2024 Ferrari team-mate head-to-head in numbers

👉F1 2024: Head-to-head qualifying record between team-mates

👉F1 2024: Head-to-head race statistics between team-mates

Charles Leclerc’s ‘bad momentum’ since Monaco

The 2025 Ferrari being the car that Charles Leclerc, not Carlos Sainz, will drive next season after Ferrari confirmed the Monegasque driver had signed a new contract, while Sainz would be making way for Lewis Hamilton.

But it is Sainz and not Leclerc who is leading Ferrari’s on-track charge. The Spaniard was the star driver in the opening rounds of the championship, even winning the Australian Grand Prix after sitting out Saudi Arabia having undergone an appendectomy.

With questions being asked about whether Ferrari had made the right choice with their 2024 line-up, Leclerc had a brief surge but it was short-lived with the six-time Grand Prix winner out-scored by Sainz in the six races since Monaco.

54 points to 39. Aside from Sergio Perez, Leclerc has scored the least number of points of the top eight drivers since that P1.

Citing a general lack of speed, Vasseur recently had a “long discussion” with Leclerc about his struggles with the team boss warning the drivers against over-compensating for his trying run.

“As soon as you have a kind of bad momentum, you feel that you have to compensate – and this is a mistake from the team, from the drivers, from everybody – because you can’t compensate,” he said.

From his side, Leclerc says Vasseur is “certainly not afraid to tell me when I get something wrong or when he thinks I’m doing or saying something wrong. I consider him a very important person to have by my side.”

Simply put, the numbers don’t lie

Out-developed, out-paced and simply out-scored by their three biggest rivals, Ferrari face a fight to finish on the 2024 F1 podium.

Although they are still 79 points up on Mercedes, current scoring rates mean that will be all but negated in Mexico before being overturned in Brazil.

Such is Mercedes’ scorecard since Monaco, they’ve brought in 170 points compared to Ferrari’s 93.

The points since Monaco

McLaren 366 – 184 = 182
Mercedes 266 – 96 = 170
Red Bull 408 – 276 = 132
Ferrari 345 – 252 = 93

The Scuderia have scored fewer than Red Bull and McLaren too while Sainz and Leclerc are behind Verstappen and Hamilton, 108, Oscar Piastri, 96, Lando Norris, 86, and George Russell 62. Only Perez has scored fewer points of the top eight.

Ferrari is also the only one of the top four teams not to bag a win in the last six races; three going to Mercedes, two to Red Bull and one to McLaren.

As such, it is not unfathomable to think that what started as a potential title challenge has become a battle to even finish on the championship podium.

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