Ferrari shocks rivals in Bahrain with phenomenal rear wing design

Despite the very few laps completed by Hamilton on Thursday morning session, Ferrari ended up at the centre of a media storm for a technical solution that debuted on the SF-26.

The Maranello’s team engineers, in fact, designed a rear wing with the DRS actuator not placed at the centre of the mainplane as it has always been, but they placed two different actuators sunk in the rear wing’s endplates.

This design has a specific solution: when the straight mode is activated and the top two flap open, they flip of about 270°, thus also inverting the direction of the wing profiles.

As is visible in the video below, by doing so, the top two flaps are oriented in the same way of an airplane’s flaps, generating lift instead of downforce.

But why would this be useful? Flipping the flaps in this direction, would probably guarantee way less drag and an overall better efficiency of the rear wing when the straight-line mode is activated, with advantages in terms of top speed.

The solution could be criticised for safety reasons: the top two flaps rotate for a big angle and, if the system breaks and the two flaps get stuck wide open, that could produce serious damages at high-speeds, especially during an overtake manoeuvre.

The rivals expect the gain to be massive and the FIA will soon intervene to judge this technical solution, but a huge praise goes to all the people in Maranello for coming out with such an innovative and clever design.