Piola: How Ferrari's first major upgrades performed

The final round before the anticipated cavalcade of upgrades are bolted on for Spain, the Azerbaijan Grand Prix had its own talking points - the idiosyncrasies of the Baku street circuit requiring a little bit of a rethink in terms of aerodynamics.

Ferrari brought its first real updates of the season, making a few additions to the aerodynamics to help out with its apparent lack of mechanical grip compared to rival Mercedes.

In Giorgio Piola's image below, we can see one of the larger changes at the rear of the car - Ferrari's new rear wing was developed to draw a little more performance on a low-drag circuit.

Regardless, it was something of a compromise; using a greater angle of attack compared to its rivals, Ferrari seemed bullish about its straightline speed and presumably, the engineers felt that the overall strength of the engine could counteract the drag penalty.

Instead, Ferrari's problems lay in terms of grip - the SF90 struggles in low-to-medium speed areas, a stark contrast to the team's strengths over the past few seasons.

With a deeper rear wing, Ferrari can sacrifice a little bit of outright speed for more grip in the corners. The team seemed to have little problem along the 2.2km straight along the edge of the Caspian Sea, but there were pinchpoints during the weekend where the car was fallible.

There's still an outright lack of grip there, seen most noticeably when Sebastian Vettel and Charles Leclerc both endured moments in Turn 8 - ending in catastrophe for the latter in qualifying.

The team had further upgrades, including detail changes to a reprofiled bargeboard section. The small strakes at the front end were reworked, and the front-most piece appeared more like the beginnings of a smaller mini-bargeboard to more effectively work the airflow emanating from the front of the car.

To do this more cohesively, the subsequent strakes were changed to ensure everything was working together - changing one thing on the car has consequences on how everything else further back behaves.

At the rear, Ferrari also made a small change to the floor - adding a bank of three fins at the rear corner just ahead of the tyre squirt slot just in front. This is something that Ferrari trialled last year in practice sessions, first emerging at Suzuka as the team sought ways to further energise the airflow being directed around the rear tyre.

It was seen on-and-off the car in subsequent sessions and events, with Ferrari initially unable to find a working configuration. But a version made it onto the design for Baku - pairing up with the diagonal slots at the rear of the car.

Ferrari had hoped that with these changes it would stand a much greater chance of putting the latent speed of the car down in the corners - but instead it once again came off second-best.

Vettel divulged post-race that the mechanical grip of the car is lacking, with both drivers struggling to 'switch on' their tyres during the race. This suggests Ferrari has work to do in chasing set-ups that combine to get the most out of this year's harder compound tyres.

Dialling in more downforce

Although Ferrari had emerged out of the blocks with a higher-downforce rear wing than its competitors on Friday, Mercedes and Renault had also followed suit by Saturday morning having not found quite enough grip around the slower sections to warrant a full Monza-style skinny-wing package.

Mercedes had run with a serrated-edge mainplane in Friday's sessions. The idea here is to minimise the amount of vortex shedding from the rear of the car as the airflow's separation point is much further along the wing's chord. This inhibits the amount of drag kicked up and, paired with the low angle-of-attack wing elements, ultimately presents a package focusing on high straightline speed.

Renault had similarly run with low-downforce specification wings, along with new endplates, but both Daniel Ricciardo and Nico Hulkenberg spent Friday languishing in the lower reaches of the standings - prompting the squad to tack on some extra downforce.

Aerodynamically, Baku is definitely a circuit of compromise; if a team judges that the straight is worth more time than the tight corners of sector two, then it can take out some wing and rely more on the chassis properties and the underbody to generate grip. But any loss of grip under acceleration can be costly, especially in the tighter sections - just ask Leclerc.

Red Bull's wishbone wizardry

Red Bull and Toro Rosso had a brand new Honda engine package to make the most of in Baku - and not a moment too soon, with the drag along the Neftchilar Avenue offering plenty of dividends for engines with more power.

Another Red Bull component that also caught the eye was its split top wishbone design at the front, where the leading suspension arm has the trailing arm tucked underneath it. The component was not new for Baku, but was sighted there properly for the first time.

Gary Anderson, our technical expert, understands that Red Bull is attempting a multi-link suspension on the top section, albeit using the same pivot to allow the front upright to rotate with the steering motion.

Anderson added that this "can be used to alter kingpin angles, which in turn will alter cambers with varying steering lock".

The kingpin inclination is the angle between the two upright mounting points at the top and bottom wishbones relative to the vertical line of the tyre.

As steering lock is applied, the car rolls outward and loads up the outside tyre, and any shift in kingpin angle can be used to improve the overall contact patch of both front tyres - improving the grip at the front end, where the inside tyre generally finds a smaller area of contact with the road.

That's going to ensure that the front end bites into the road a little more easily - reducing the overall need for drivers to see-saw at the wheel in an attempt to rotate the car to assume the correct position for a corner.

It has been used in F1 before - by Toyota - but that was on the rear-end of the car with Red Bull pioneering its use at the front.