Newsletter

Ferrari takes the SF23 out on the track in a presentation to make the ‘tifosi’ fall in love

In front of hundreds of ‘tifosi’, Ferrari took off the corset of its formal presentations to give millions of fans around the world an event worthy of its legend. After years in which the exhibition of the car turned into a boring press conference with a few journalists, managers of the brand and guests in a room, they decided to move to Fiorano, the nearby test circuit (you can walk from the factory ) of the Scuderia in the small town of Maranello to make it run for the first time. It is quite a declaration of intent: Ferrari is not only for drivers or for the great elites, it is a way of understanding life.

Some 500 Scuderia fans had Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz a few meters away, who felt their warmth up close. After a disappointing 2022 season that claimed the head of Mattia Binotto, Frederic Vassuer, the new team boss, hit the table. After seeing how his rivals showed models, rendered images or simple decorations on last year’s cars, he decided to open the doors to debut his car. An SF23 that, although it will be remarkably different from the one seen on the track in Bahrain, is already fully functional: it did five laps with Charles Leclerc at the wheel while Carlos Sainz was in the box asking about his feelings.

The unit shown in Fiorano maintains the continuist lines that already worked for them in 2022. If anything, the ‘pool’ that it had on the engine cover of the pontoons has been made less pronounced, the nose has been retouched to refine it and shorten it slightly and it has been He has opted for some air intakes that are far from the aggressiveness that was seen in, for example, the Aston Martin. Many details and tweaks that will evolve, predictably, before the car returns to the track.

Related News

The networks surrendered to the event. The vast majority of Ferrari and Formula 1 fans highlighted the courage of the Scuderia to make such a presentation, live, with the number of things that can go wrong. There were some who remembered, for example, that blue screen that jumped at the premiere of the mythical Windows 98, in the face of surprise and shame of Bill Gates himself. Ferrari has put out a brave hand to start the game, in this mental case, to put pressure on their rivals: they not only have a car that works, but also do not wait for a day of filming.

Those five limited laps were given by Charles Leclerc and not Carlos Sainz after an alleged lottery in the form of a coin toss. Conspiracy theorists could say that it is the first nod to Vasseur’s favoritism, who has already had Leclerc under his command in the past, but it goes without saying that at this point it would be too naïve a resource to take it into account. Sainz has, a priori, the same role in the team as his teammate ‘Percival’ Leclerc.

And those appendages on the nose?

Each presentation, especially those that dare to show something of the real car, serves to see where the ‘trick’ is that the engineers are looking for. As the Anglo-Saxons say, the devil is in the details, and there is one of those shown by Ferrari that has attracted a lot of attention: the nose.

Although in 2022 they already threw it back, the technical managers of the Scuderia have recovered some small appendages, some ‘winglets’ according to the English terminology that is so widely used in a technical world such as that of Formula 1. Predictably these wings will be modified already in the tests, but of course it is a warning for the teams: Ferrari is going to try to innovate. Another very different matter is that they are ‘worst’ or improvements.

All the details, both visible and implicit, of an event largely led by the Spanish Marc Gené come to erase the bad taste that the tifosi had to go through in 2022. In a campaign in which things are expected to be much tighter, Ferrari goes on the attack. You just have to see if this SF23 really does not remain a declaration of intent and reaches something more, but of course there is a small change with respect to what has been seen on other occasions.

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Trending