Ferrari has put its Miami card on the table. At a filming day held at Monza today, the Scuderia ran the SF-26 in its full Miami specification for the first time, with a revised Macarena rear wing, a new front wing, an updated floor and a set of halo fins that were not on the car at Suzuka.
Internally the package has been described as an "upgrade and a half". The early images that emerged from the filming day suggested something slightly less than that billing — there was no sign of the rumoured wholesale rear-end rework — but the changes that are on the car are purposeful and focused on the weaknesses the launch car has carried since Australia.
The centrepiece is the updated Macarena rear wing. Version one, introduced at the start of the season, did its job on straight-line speed but brought a set of actuator and balance complications that the team has been working to solve since testing. The V2 revises the rear wing endplate chord radius, re-profiles the pylons, and adjusts the centre-span extension on the SRM flap. The end-plate-mounted actuator mechanism has been realigned — the grooved section visible in the corners of the V1 endplates has been smoothed out — and the separators between the main plane and the second element of the wing have been removed entirely.
The stated purpose of the centre-span extension change is to unload the actuators during the rotation of the wing. In plain language: Ferrari is trying to make the mechanism less fragile without giving up the straight-line benefit that made the Macarena concept worth the trouble in the first place.
Ahead of the rear wing, the new front wing and updated floor are the parts that should matter most for lap time. Ferrari has not confirmed specific numbers, but the SF-26's behaviour in high-load corners has been the weakness that has kept Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton off the front two rows all season, and the floor changes target that profile directly. A reworked front wing is the usual accompaniment to a floor update, and the revised flap geometry visible in the filming day imagery is consistent with a wider balance shift rather than a cosmetic tweak.
Then there are the halo fins. The small appendages sit in the region around the cockpit opening and function as flow conditioners, cleaning up the airflow before it reaches the airbox and rear wing. Ferrari had a version of this concept at Shanghai earlier in the season, where the FIA intervened and required modifications. The Monza filming day package carries a new interpretation of the idea. Whether it survives Miami scrutineering unaltered is one of the open questions heading into the race weekend.
The context around all of this is blunt. Mercedes has dominated the opening three rounds, with George Russell and Kimi Antonelli running first and second in the championship and the W17's power unit looking clearly ahead of the Ferrari 066/12 package. Red Bull, running the Ford-built in-house engine, has collapsed out of the fight entirely. Ferrari has been the only team to land consistent podiums outside of the Mercedes duo, thanks to Leclerc's third place in Australia and Hamilton's in China, but the raw pace gap has refused to close.
The Miami upgrade is Ferrari's attempt to close it before the season pattern hardens. The team will run the updates for real in Friday practice at Miami International Autodrome in ten days' time. Mercedes, in turn, is expected to bring the first clear W17 evolution of the season to the same race. What happens on the timesheets after that will decide whether the phrase "upgrade and a half" was ambitious, accurate, or just optimistic.
Source: youtube.com