Ferrari’s car concept in recent years has been quite unique, but it has yielded them a lot of performance gains against their rivals. However, they seem to be aligning their front suspension design with Red Bull and McLaren’s ahead of the 2025 season.
Rumors suggest that Ferrari’s new challenger could have a pull-rod suspension design, which has proven quite effective in the ground-effect era.
Haas, a Ferrari customer, may have inadvertently hinted at this change by not taking the new front suspension design, per The Race. The Kannapolis-based outfit usually takes as many shareable components from Ferrari as possible, including front and rear suspensions, gearboxes, engines, and rear crash structures.
However, they may not be able to inculcate the pull-rod suspension design in their new car, owing to their limited resources relative to their engine supplier.
“While Haas will use Ferrari’s 2025 rear suspension and gearbox, it felt changing too much at the front would not deliver a big enough gain considering the limited resources it has at its disposal to make it work,” The Race F1 journalist said in their latest video.
Ferrari, meanwhile, is reportedly hoping that this change will help them gain performance against McLaren and Red Bull, helping them win the title in 2025.
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Red Bull have been the pioneer of pull-rod suspensions since 2022. The amount of success they have tasted with this design also stimulated McLaren to follow suit before the 2024 season, which was a masterstroke as the Woking-based outfit clinched the Constructors’ championship last year.
Ferrari, having stuck to a push-rod design at the front in 2024, may want to emulate the same.
Difference between a push-rod and a pull-rod suspension
The first visual difference between a push-rod and a pull-rod suspension is their geometry on the car. In a push-rod design, the strut of the suspension is connected from the lower wishbone to the upper edge of the chassis with a spring inside to absorb the kinetic energy of impacts on the car while taking kerbs and bumps on the track.
The pull-rod concept inverts this geometry with a connection from the upper wishbone near the wheel to the lower edge of the chassis. Both concepts work differently and have a ripple effect on the car’s handling and aerodynamics as well.
When a car with a push-rod suspension rides a bump, the impact force ‘pushes’ the rocker to absorb the kinetic energy in the spring inside the strut. Meanwhile, the pull-rod has the opposite effect on the rocker to absorb the same energy.
In the ground-effect era, though, the pull and push-rod designs have also served a critical role in managing the airflow of the car. Usually, a pull-rod concept helps a team to run a car lower to the ground, which will enable them to generate more downforce.
On the other hand, push-rod suspensions are the ideal designs to avoid plank wear by running too low, but teams tend to lose downforce in that case. Red Bull’s aggressive choice for a pull-rod suspension explains their dominant success in F1 lately.
