Ferrari has strived to improve the reliability of its 499P World Endurance Championship contender after non-finishes blighted its 2024 Hypercar campaign.
Although its #50 entry finished runner-up in the standings, the other two Ferraris were eighth and ninth with a combined three DNFs across the eight-round season.
So during the Italian marque’s 2025 launch in Fiorano this week, Ferrari revealed it has undertaken a root and branch overhaul of its Le Mans Hypercar to avoid a repeat of the problems.
Ferdinando Cannizzo, head of design on Ferrari’s sportscar racing programmes, said: “We have spent the last half of the [2024] season and the winter time to improve the car mainly on the reliability side.
“We played on that side a lot: I would say that 50 percent of the modifications were made with this intent.
“Every area of the car has been impacted by the modifications. We have done minor or significant modifications in terms of reliability on the suspension, electrical stuff and structural improvements.”
But Ferrari has not only addressed the issues that resulted in its #51 499P shared by Antonio Giovinazzi, James Calado and Alessandro Pier Guidi retiring at the Austin and Fuji races in September, as well as the #83 customer entry driven by Robert Kubica, Yifei Ye and Robert Shwartzman stopping at the Le Mans 24 Hours in June.
“At the end of each race we finished, we found something we could improve, even at the last test,” Cannizzo added.
He thinks the reliability improvements “can give us a car that is much more robust, more confident to drive at the edge - inherently it can have an impact on performance in terms of consistency”.
Ferrari has confirmed that it has not invoked a second ‘evo joker’ upgrade for the new season after the introduction of revised brake cooling at the Interlagos race last July.
But Cannizzo explained that roughly 25 percent of the improvements for the coming season were linked to performance.
He stressed that they weren’t hardware changes but related to “a better interpretation of our car to exploit the aero, the tyres, the potential”.
The final portion of the revisions for 2025 relate to the regulatory changes, including the requirement to run an LED display panel on each sidepod that will indicate the position each car is running during a race, as well as other information that is yet to be disclosed.
This was part of the reason behind a livery change for the two factory entries run by AF Corse for the third season of the 499P.
The stripes in the Modena yellow of Ferrari’s home town now run along the upper surfaces of the rear bodywork rather than down the sidepod. The base colour of the works 499P is now a deeper or blood red, which Ferrari sportscar racing boss Antonello Coletta described as a “reminder of the past”.
Ferrari is heading into this season with an unchanged driver line-up: the two crews of Giovinazzi, Calado and Pier Guidi in #51 and Nicklas Nielsen, Antonio Fuoco and Miguel Molina in #50.
Phil Hanson has joined Kubica and Ye in the customer AF entry replacing Shwartzman, who has moved to the IndyCar Series with Prema Racing.
The 2025 WEC campaign starts with the Qatar 1812Km 10-hour race on 28 February, with the official pre-season prologue test happening at the Losail International Circuit on 21-22 February.
