Ferrari with more aggressive heights due to the aero configuration, Red Bull and McLaren the most conservative

Translation:

In Austin, some important limitations of the Sprint Race format and the little time left for the engineers to work on the basic set-up became apparent. Four pitlane starts and two disqualifications are an important number for F1, and certainly not flattering. The FIA is also unable to carry out more extensive and thorough checks. Ferrari dared with the heights to make the more unloaded aerodynamic choice work, managed the pace to contain wear, but also paid the price for the management of elements such as the Power Unit and brakes, as well as a flawed strategy on Leclerc.

The most surprising moment of the Grand Prix of the Americas in Austin was certainly the one that took place after the race. At the end of the celebrations and ritual interviews, the FIA issued a communiqué announcing that the cars of Charles Leclerc (Ferrari) and Lewis Hamilton (Mercedes) had been checked, along with those of Lando Norris (McLaren) and Max Verstappen (Red Bull), and found not to comply with the regulations with regard to the wear of the board mounted under the bottom. The consequence was only one, namely the disqualification of the Monegasque and the Englishman, with the consequent change in the classification that saw mainly Carlos Sainz take the podium and Logan Sargeant enter the points zone, with a paradoxical gain for Ferrari in this situation compared to Mercedes. The cases of Ferrari and Mercedes, but also Aston Martin and Haas prove that the Sprint Race format is limiting on a technical level The new Sprint Race format has greatly reduced the time available for teams to work on race weekends, relying almost exclusively on simulations carried out at the factory. So the engineers, having been deprived of private testing, now have even less time to work on the track, with collateral damage increasingly emerging. Today's F1s are an advanced technological work of art, built and designed in simulators and wind tunnels, but the track will always remain the only real test that engineers have as feedback. Limiting testing was an economic choice, which goes against the nature of the sport and against the possibility of experimenting and evolving these single-seaters with more freedom. This is also why a recovery on a dominant team becomes more complex.An hour of free practice makes it impossible to experiment with new components or experimental setups. The only way is to diversify the choices on the cars and make judgments only after an hour, hoping not to run into problems like the Aston Martin during FP1 in Austin precisely.

Precisely in Texas we saw four starts from the pit lane on Sunday, as the setups studied in the simulator turned out to be wrong and it was necessary to upset the cars with different wing choices - more load for Haas - or even completely different solutions - Aston Martin left the updates on Stroll to return instead to the old package with Fernando Alonso - in the closed park regime, violating the regulations. Unpleasant situations that testify to how, despite the many tools available, work on the track remains fundamental.

On this generation of cars, in fact, the underbody is the most powerful part, and it varies the amount of load generated according to the height above the ground. The very bumpy asphalt in Austin - no surprise now - forced some teams to make changes during free practice. Ferrari's sporting director Diego Ioverno admitted that the SF-23 was raised after FP1 having found how much the unevenness could damage the surface and wear out the skid, but that was not enough because until Sunday it was not possible to study the car's behaviour with maximum fuel on board. The most wear on the skid occurred at the start of the race, and then subsided as the laps went by. The absence of several hours of free practice and the running of Qualifying and Sprint thus misled some technicians ahead of Sunday's race.

Charles Leclerc's disqualification was certainly a blow for Ferrari - who had already reached the limit in Austria with the bottom wear after the race - but the fact that the same mistake was made by Mercedes with Lewis Hamilton makes the decision less bitter and impossible to appeal, since in the Constructors' Championship the Maranello-based team earns more points than the Brackley-based one. According to formu1a.uno, the two Ferrari SF-23s were on very similar setups and this suggests that Carlos Sainz's situation was no different in terms of wear. The same could be applied to George Russell's second Mercedes or the teams that were not inspected, which highlights the limit of these post-race checks. The FIA randomly chooses certain cars at the end of the race because unfortunately they do not have the possibility (technical and human) to inspect all 20 cars at the end of the race. This would require much more time to certify the ranking. The only solution is to choose randomly and limit the judgement to those cars. In addition to the two aforementioned, the cars of Max Verstappen and Lando Norris were also examined, but they were well within the limits of the regulations and did not incur any penalties. Ferrari: in Austin the biggest problem was not (only) degradation The aerodynamic choice made at Maranello was to set the SF-23 with a lower load than the competition, and this allowed Sainz and Leclerc to soar in top speeds and make them fearsome in attacking and defending in the melee. Ferrari managed to deal with the degradation by setting a pace that was not too severe, gaining load from the minimum ground clearance. Carlos Sainz managed the Soft as best he could on Saturday and was the author of a good race on Sunday, while Charles Leclerc had a few more problems especially in the final stints, although on Sunday the biggest problem was the wrong strategy, as admitted by Frederic Vasseur.

The one-stop strategy devised for Leclerc required the Monegasque to introduce the tyres very slowly in order to make them last as long as possible. This choice, however, cost him many seconds at the start and end of the stint, thus ruining his chances of fighting for the podium. On the contrary, Carlos Sainz was able to be even more aggressive, showing an SF-23 not so far behind the others. Indeed, the Spaniard kept up with Verstappen in the second stint on Medium and in the final stint on Hard, even catching up with Lando Norris until the final laps. Clearly in this the choice of setup had a big impact. However, the structural limitations of the SF-23 came to the fore once again. The basic setup with less load was linked to a weak front end which, despite the latest improvements to the bottom end, is still not perfectly balanced with a rear end equipped with a maximum load wing. FP1 also made it impossible for Ferrari to experiment with different solutions, taking final decisions right from the factory.

What limited the performance the most in Austin, however, were many small problems that other teams have also experienced, namely the management of the Power Unit - especially critical for Charles Leclerc - and the brakes. At Maranello they are waiting to unleash a new engine for this season finale, so as to have more certainty. The final collapse in the Sprint Race of Leclerc, anomalous for how it happened and for the confrontation with Sainz, should be seen as the combination of degradation but above all management of these components, while on Sunday the biggest problem is to be found in a wrong strategy, which will require the intervention of Vasseur in order to improve the foundations and operations of the team that often bases its choices on wrong data and wrong thoughts. Authors: Paolo D'Alessandro & Giuliano Duchessa