Ferrari F1 Miami Grand Prix upgrades branded as ‘soul-destroying’ by former engineer Rob Smedley

Former Formula 1 engineer Rob Smedley has labelled Ferrari’s upgrade at the Miami Grand Prix as “slightly soul-destroying”.

There was much hype and expectation surrounding Ferrari as it brought a substantial upgrade package to Miami, however the Italian outfit underperformed across the weekend.

Lewis Hamilton could only finish sixth while Charles Leclerc was classified eighth (following a post-race penalty) as Ferrari fell behind McLaren and Red Bull with what was ultimately a disappointing performance.

And Smedley, who worked at Ferrari between 2004 and 2013, believes the Scuderia will be left feeling disheartened.

“It's slightly soul-destroying because it starts from a technical point of view. It starts essentially this negative loop that you've then got to [dissect]. What did you bring? What's working? What's not working?” Smedley told the High Performance Podcast.

"If it's not correlating, as in the wind tunnel or your simulation tools are not matching what's on track, you've then got to do this whole reverse engineering process where you go back to the tunnel, and that holds up all of the development in the tunnel that you should be doing.”

Smedley was joined on the podcast by former Alpine team principal Otmar Szafnauer, who raised concerns about Ferrari’s correlation.

“There are two things that happen,” he said. “You have finite resources, and now you're putting those resources on correlation, not making the car go faster. And the reason you're doing that is because if you don't have good correlation, it's only luck that you make the car go faster, right?

“So you've got to fix that, if that's what their issue is, first and foremost. But the same engineers who would be looking at on-track performance are now looking at correlation issues.

"There are some different teams that have different groups, but when I was at Aston and Racing Point and Force India, we had a pretty big APG group, which is an aeroperformance group, and they were the people who would look at correlation, mainly, not so much development but correlation.

"When I went to Alpine, they had like three. That was one of the things I thought to myself as not being enough. If you've got perfect correlation, no problem. But if you wake up and you don't and you only have three people in APG, you're going to struggle.

"Then what happens is just what I described. You get your aerodynamicist looking at correlation, and now they're not looking at making the car go faster. So it is a problem."