Ferrari F1: Wind Tunnel vs Budget – Performance Trade-off

Ferrari has turned the page in the new year: the Scuderia’s objective is to make the fans forget the terrible 2025 championship which ended in fourth place in the Constructors’ World Championship, to start the journey in the new regulatory cycle in a positive way which proposes agile single-seaters instead of ground-effect ones.

We have said it again and again: it is a great revolution that completely changes the face of F1 with cars that will be very different (finally lighter, shorter and narrower) so all the technical values ​​will be revised and some hierarchies could also change.

The Cavallino team, by Frederic Vasseur’s own admission, had interrupted the aerodynamic development of the SF-25 already at the end of April, dedicating time and human and financial resources to the 678 project which is rapidly coming to fruition.

The Maranello team almost certainly paid for the premature stop of the work in the wind tunnel in the results achieved in the second part of the 2025 season, when the hope was to reduce the gap from McLaren with the adoption of the revised rear suspension, which then did not give the results that Loic Serra’s technicians expected.

The fact is that the year of zero victories will have effects on a 2026 season that will begin very soon with the Barcelona tests behind closed doors at the end of the month: the positive impact will be that Ferrari will be able to count on a greater number of hours in the wind tunnel in the first six months compared to 2025, but 18 million euros are missing from the forecast budget that was launched last June, because the team had planned to close the championship in second place in the Constructors’ Championship.

If the gap from McLaren in 2024 was only 14 points and had kept the fight for the title open until the last GP in Abu Dhabi, deserving the place of honour, the gap between the Papaya single-seaters opened last year, becoming a chasm: 435 points which earned them relegation to fourth place among the teams.

Ferrari wind tunnel

Photo by: Ferrari

There is a question that is legitimate to ask: will the aerodynamic advantage that is offered to Diego Tondi’s staff and the group that operates at CFD have more weight or will there be a negative impact because in the prizes that FOM will award there will be 18 million euros less in the budget?

Obviously there is no certain answer, because it will depend a lot on the quality of the work they will be able to carry out at the Gestion Sportiva: in quantitative terms compared to McLaren, Ferrari will have greater availability of the wind tunnel for 180 hours of use of the wind tunnel. (1,020 hours compared to 840 for the Woking team).

According to the ATP (Aerodynamic Testing Periods) of the FIA ​​which regulates aerodynamic development, the data we have given refer to the actual time of use of the tunnel which also includes the phases of model preparation and configuration changeswhile the hours of “wind”, i.e. those useful for carrying out tests, are much smaller and are measured in runs. Maranello will have 272 until June, Andrea Stella’s team will have 48 fewer.

The discussion on CFD research (acronym for computational fluid dynamics) is similar: the Scuderia can afford to study 1,700 “geometries”, 300 more than McLaren.

Lewis Hamilton, Ferrari

Foto di: Steven tee / Lat Images via Getty Images

If the lack of budget can be reduced with a distribution of resources that should not, if not partially, detract from the 678, the possibility of exploiting the development tools more than the world champions should be an advantage, considering, however, that Adrian Newey will have more facilities thanks to the seventh place achieved by Aston Martin in the Constructors’ Championship.

It will be important to understand how the Scuderia will have used the 2025 tunnel time to the advantage of the new red which will be seen on January 23rd: we will see immediately if the 678 project is born healthy, starting from the winter tests. It must be said that McLaren also stopped the development of the MCL39 early, certainly before Mercedes and Red Bull. And then, if the desired gain does not materialize, the increased search time in the wind tunnel could be decisive in the attempt to correct the errors.

Is this perhaps why Vasseur spoke of a season that will be decided more by developments during the season than by the immature car that will be deployed at the start of the season?

Hours of development in the wind tunnel until the end of June

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– The Motorsport.com team