F1: Ferrari to Trial More Upgrades for Austrian GP

Scuderia Ferrari will trial more performance updates at the 2019 Austrian GP in their bid to catch Mercedes in what has been a fraught campaign thus for the Italian outfit. This comes off the back of another disappointing outing at the French GP at Circuit Paul Ricard where Mercedes wrapped up their sixth 1-2 finish of the season where Charles Leclerc finished third and Sebastian Vettel finished in fifth place.

It was also one of several weekends where Ferrari will be trialling several aerodynamic updates on the SF90 in a bid to improve performance. While the new parts brought to France brought a mixed picture as they only kept the front and rear wing for the Grand Prix itself, it offered an opportunity for Ferrari to try things out to get an idea of where it is going wrong.

But asked how the new parts on the SF90 felt during Friday practice at Paul Ricard, Sebastian Vettel admitted to motorsport.com:

“Not so good, to be honest, a lot of work ahead of us. Yeah, [they] didn’t bring what we were expecting, so we’ll see what we can try and find overnight, to maybe be a bit better off tomorrow.” – Sebastian Vettel

But with such a quick turnaround from the French to the Austrian GPs, Ferrari have said that they will bring ‘various parts’ to evaluate their performance around the Red Bull Ring as they vie to catch Mercedes and find answers to their continual aerodynamic deficiencies suffered by the SF90.

While the Austrian GP should see Ferrari closer to Mercedes on pure performance than they were in France, it will offer another opportunity to test solutions for the more aero-dependent races ahead at Silverstone, Hockenheim and the Hungaroring before the Formula 1 summer break.

At the centre of Ferrari’s efforts will be the new floor that they trialled in France which did not produced the desired results. And while it will take several weeks to produce a new one, they will hope that the parts that they have brought to Austria will help to solve some of the aerodynamic issues.

So ahead of this weekend’s race at Spielberg, Ferrari Team Principal Mattia Binotto told autosport.com that:

“The floor not working properly is a lack of answers. We will work on that one. We’ll have some test items again in Austria to try to understand, and we will only understand fully when all the parts work as expected.” – Mattia Binotto

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