Ferrari presents their 2023 F1 challenger SF23

The most successful team in the history of Formula 1 Ferrari has unveiled their new car for 2023, called the SF23, with which it hopes to win the first championship since 2008 and which should correct the shortcomings of its predecessor, which was the second best car last year.

After two disappointing winless seasons, Ferrari returned to winning ways last year with a 1-2 victory at the season opener in Bahrain, but despite an encouraging start, Red Bull overtook them in car development during the season.

Although last year’s F1-75 was the fastest car at the start of the season and was impeccably reliable, this changed over the course of the season as Red Bull developed their RB18 and Ferrari was hit with a number of reliability issues with a power unit that saw a big jump in power in its final year of engine development.

This year, Ferrari has the same driver line-up consisting of Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz, but they have a new team boss since Mattia Binotto, who led them since 2019, left the company, and the new boss is Frederic Vasseur who arrived from Alfa Romeo.

With the new SF23, Ferrari has kept the same development direction they set with last year’s F1-75 with a unique sidepod design, but the Italian team has refined every aspect of the car in pursuit of performance.

One of the key things that Ferrari has been working on is reliability, which last year was not at the level needed to win the championship since work on the reliability of the power unit is still allowed, regardless of the freeze on performance development.

Immediately after the presentation in Fiorano, Ferrari did the first kilometers in the new SF23 as part of a demonstration drive of 15 kilometers, five laps on this circuit, and Leclerc was the first to drive two laps, after which Sainz drove three more laps.

The biggest visual changes are the nose and front wing, where the tip of the nose is not anymore attached to the lowest element but to the element above it, and the sidepods are slightly more compact and the rear end tapers at the back earlier for better airflow over the diffuser.

The arrangement of the cooling slots on the upper side of the sidepods has also changed, as now the slots are arranged in two rows, while cooling is also aided by two vertical openings behind the end of the halo protection.

The attention was also drawn by the vertical inlets under the sidepod openings for the radiators, the purpose of which is still unknown, and the shape of the intake above the driver’s head is still triangular and rather small compared to its rivals, which leaves room for small L-shaped vanes located on each side, as on the predecessor F1-75.