Ferrari AF Corse is bringing a suite of reliability-focused updates to the 499P for the 2025 FIA WEC season, as it pushes to capture a third consecutive win at Le Mans and claim its first Hypercar World Endurance Manufacturers’ Championship.
Speaking with reporters at the Circuito di Fiorano yesterday, Ferdinando Cannizzo – the head of endurance race cars at Ferrari – explained that a huge amount of work has been completed ahead of the season to optimise the 499P ahead of its third WEC campaign.
“The car looks similar, there are no bodywork changes, no ‘Jokers’ in play for the season, but nevertheless we spent the last half of the 2024 season and the winter working. We have improved the reliability side,” he revealed.
“It was a big effort. There are several modifications under the skin that don’t count as ‘Jokers’. I would say 50 percent of the modifications have been made for reliability, a quarter related to new regulation updates like the position panel and the last quarter on interventions that we did for performance improvements that are not changes to the car, but a better interpretation of our car to exploit aero, tyres and our potential.”
Over the past 12 months, Ferrari has been putting the 499P through its paces at a range of circuits – most recently last month in Qatar ahead of the season opener – and completed around 15,000 kilometres over roughly 16 days. It’s an impressive total when you factor in the restrictions imposed on the Hypercar manufacturers by regulation.
Cannizzo explained that Ferrari pushed to maximise each day of track time to increase mileage, by running from 8 am to midnight instead of 9 am to 5 pm.
“For a good validation,” he continued, “8-10 thousand (kilometres of track testing) is what you need to have a solution that’s properly validated. That’s the difficulty in developing something with such big restrictions on testing time.”
When asked by DSC to go into more detail regarding the areas of the 499P that have been updated for 2025, Cannizzo declared that “every area of the car has been impacted by modification.”
“I cannot say there is one specific area,” he continued. “We did minor or significant modifications in terms of reliability in areas like suspension, the looms, the electrical stuff, structural stuff, all the areas that can give us a car that is more robust and confident to drive on the edge.
“These can have an impact on performance, not on nominal performance but probably in consistency.”
The 499P has shown on numerous occasions over its first two seasons that it is capable of producing race-winning pace in the most important races of the season.
Reliability though, was an area of concern for Ferrari in 2024, despite – as Cannizzo proudly pointed out – it being “one of three manufacturers that finished every race with one car together with Porsche and Toyota.”
The #51 crew finished eighth in the standings last year after suffering DNFs at CoTA and Fuji in the second half of the season due to transmission and hybrid failures respectively. The #83 car was also hit by a terminal hybrid issue, at Le Mans, though it was not the same “fault in the power electronics” related to the way some parts were produced that ended the #51’s race in Japan.
In order to take the next step and fight for the title over the course of the season in ’25, Ferrari believes the combination of incremental improvements to the car’s durability and experience gained over two years in the championship will make a key difference.
“We are still a very young team,” Cannizzo stressed. “At every race, we try to learn something. We made an effort at the end of last season and in the winter to learn from every situation. To win this year we definitely need the performance of the car but we need to be excellent in all the operations, and strategic decisions, otherwise, we lose important points.”
Looking further ahead, he also reiterated that further “Joker” updates to the 499P are being worked on, following the updates introduced at Sao Paulo last year. However, these will not be introduced before 2026 due to restrictions being placed on in-season performance updates.
While Cannizzo explained that a ban has not been written into the regulations for this year, he confirmed a “guideline” is now in place.
“While we are preparing for this season, the tests we did and we are going to do are focused on the future,” he concluded. “We are preparing modifications for next season or 2027.”
Images courtesy of FIA WEC, Ferrari
