The car Ferrari hopes will arrest its alarming F1 slide

Cult consumer TV show Rogue Traders will have its work cut out, given the quantity of leaks that have sprung up amid Formula 1’s 2021 launch season. Alfa Romeo, Aston Martin and Williams have all endured pre-embargo sneak previews, leaks and hackings over the previous few weeks, before Ferrari took its turn in the limelight earlier than expected.

Out of the teams taking part in the latest F1 season, Ferrari carries the largest weight of expectation. The 2020 season was an abject year in which it went from challenging for victories to toiling in the battle amid the midfielders. Even in the battle for best of the rest, it was outclassed thanks to an overly draggy aero package and a lobotomised power unit that cost the team its potency on the straights.

At Maranello, the team of engineers have attempted to turn that tide with the SF21. Sure, there are inherent characteristics of the package that cannot be fully ironed out, owing to the carryover from 2020, but a fresh powerplant and the continuation of the work done throughout last year should help to arrest the slide.

PLUS: How Ferrari plans to recover from its 2020 F1 nightmare 

There’s lots to talk about too, with plenty of new additions to the 2021 car that Ferrari’s famed tifosi will hope will enact an ascent through the order. But, starting with the bad news, the ‘21 livery is really poor. This is an eventuality  that shouldn’t really be possible when your livery design modus operandi is, well, paint it red.

But there’s two atrocities, one being the first-year Photoshop student airbrush to the deeper red hue used at last year’s Tuscan Grand Prix, which makes a cameo at the back of the engine cover. The second is the bizarre decision to lumber the engine cover with a green Mission Winnow logo. Although it probably won’t remain there for a good handful of races, it’s still a jarring mixture of colours. Out of the 2021 liveries, I think this is the worst of the bunch.

Charles Leclerc, Ferrari, Carlos Sainz Jr., Ferrari, Mattia Binotto, Team Principal Ferrari

Photo by: Ferrari

With regards to the actual design of the car, there’s been plenty of attention to it to ail its shortfalls from last season. Ferrari has stayed pretty true to the thumb-tip nose designs used over the past few years, and although it has avoided following the same direction as some of its rivals in opting for a thinner variant, it has also elected not to retain the status quo. Rather than squaring off at the wing mountings, Ferrari has let the nose transition into the thumb-tip crash structure in more of a tear-drop shape, also shuffling the mounting pylons in board slightly.

This keeps the nose channels that Ferrari first introduced in the second half of 2019, but opens up the cape under the nose to allow more interplay between the front wing and the aero parts underneath the front of the car.

The front wing is a continuation of the same concept used by the team over the past couple of seasons, although the second element is now united with the mainplane to leave the important tip vortex generation - which is fired underneath the front suspension to direct the front wheel turbulence outwards - to the top three elements. The trailing edge of the endplate has been reworked to include a curved cut-out of the upper corner, with a fin at the rear of the footplate helping to turn airflow outwards. This, presumably, is to help work the airflow later on to compensate for any losses to the floor.

Ferrari has followed some of its competitors and opted for the shutter blind-style array that should help to lift airflow up and outwards. Admittedly, it doesn’t look like a very neatly proportioned addition, but sometimes the most utilitarian-looking components are the most valuable

Ferrari did not run any fins on top of the nose, located between the two front wheels, last season – but it has opted for an aggressive-looking quartet of winglets either side that seem to be turning airflow out and around the car. These will play with the re-designed S-duct, which picks up any turbulent areas of flow around the nose and redirects them to the top of the chassis to keep the front end working as intended.

There are changes to the bargeboards too, with a remodelled leading edge - perhaps as a legacy of the newly added talon-like fins on top of the chassis. It retains the twin-boomerang arrangement, mounted between the main bargeboard arrangement and the outer vanes mounted to the sidepods. It appears that, of those sidepod-mounted elements, the main piece (marked with the Radiobook decal) has been set down slightly compared to last year, perhaps to play more nicely with the redesigned sidepods.

Shadowing that is a secondary element mounted closer to the sidepod inlet, so perhaps the outboard red-coloured part has been manoeuvred to work more with any turbulence from the front wheels. Between this and the outboard mountings for the boomerang elements, Ferrari has followed some of its competitors and opted for the shutter blind-style array that should help to lift airflow up and outwards. Admittedly, it doesn’t look like a very neatly proportioned addition, but sometimes the most utilitarian-looking components are the most valuable. There’s also a new pair of fins on the top surface of the winglet before the sidepod, one decorated in the colours of the Italian flag. It had to go somewhere, after all.

Ferrari SF21 detail

Photo by: Ferrari

Ferrari, like most teams, had used the top surface of the sidepods to sweep airflow down to the floor to help maximise the diffuser’s effectiveness. It has done so again for 2021, but with a more pronounced tuck-in to help open up more of the floor available. With the reduction in floor size, the teams which have launched before have attempted to reduce the sidepod size even further to make more floor available to use – and Ferrari has done the same.

It’s unclear what Ferrari’s approach to floor developments are at this stage, given that the team tried two separate designs over the course of 2020 – a curled rear corner the first, and the second featuring set of inward-facing fins – so it won’t be unexpected to see a development of those ideas. The launch model seems to feature the curled variant but, as we’ve seen from other teams, this could simply be a placeholder.

Forward of the heinous green decal on the engine cover, Ferrari has retained the horns that it reintroduced into the F1 lexicon last season. They’re less defined as Ferrari has increased the size of the intake, opting for a rounder shape by adding two extra openings either side of the triangular roll structure, but that allows the team to reduce the side of its sidepods. These horns should help to tidy up the airflow before it reaches the rear wing. Within, there's the revised power unit and a new gearbox too, as Ferrari has used its two permissible tokens on reworking the rear end of the car.

As the Ferrari transitions from its bright red into its beef stock-packet claret, the rear wing follows suit. The launch renders seem to have the rear wing in much the same construction as that used by Ferrari at the higher-downforce circuits on the 2020 calendar, including the later-season redesign of the endplates and the spoon-shaped rear wing. The team has also kept the under-over shotgun exhausts used last year, suggesting that the basic architecture under the skin remains the same.

It’s a big year for Ferrari, one which carries the chance to atone for a miserable 2020 with the litany of changes made for the new season. It’s perhaps too much of a stretch to expect a return to challenging Mercedes on a regular basis, but the Scuderia should at least be in for a bigger points haul compared to last season. Where it finds itself in the midfield battle should also dictate when it drops the SF21’s development and picks up the 2022 car full-time; if it’s miles off or miles ahead, it can afford to make the switch early, but a close battle with the teams around it may complicate things.

PLUS: What Ferrari must do to reach the peak in F1 again 

But there’s one thing it can do early doors to at least reclaim some degree of respectability among its rivals. After all, it holds in its mortal hands a nugget of purest green – well, more of a splat really – and it needs to turn it into a colour that doesn’t look quite as aesthetically challenging.

Ferrari SF21 detail

Photo by: Ferrari