As F1 braces itself for the new, more stringent, front wing load and deflection tests that come into force at the Spanish Grand Prix, it’s clear that Ferrari have arrived with some meaningful alterations to their assembly to combat the new tests, whilst also altering other design aspects along the way.

The overall design philosophy of the wing remains the same with their new design, when compared with the solution raced in the opening eight rounds of the championship but, they’ve made a suite of changes to the outboard section of the wing, seemingly in an effort to extract more outwash performance.

FIA flexi-wing test: All change at Ferrari

It’s understood that Ferrari introduced a new, more flexible, front wing arrangement at the United States Grand Prix, last season, in an effort to find some of the performance gains that had been noted on rivals cars.

On that occasion the actual architecture of the design hadn’t changed though, meaning it was never listed in the car presentation document, with more notable ground being made up in terms of design in the races that followed and with the introduction of the SF-25.

Studying the makeup of the new solution introduced in Spain, with the old version suggests that there’s only been a number of subtle geometrical alterations made to the main flap section, with most of that centred around the two upper flaps.

As noted in the main image, if we take the leading edge geometry of the old design (green dotted line) and trailing edge geometry of the upper flap, then impose them on the new design there’s some clear differences.

Albeit, we should put in a caveat that the images haven’t been taken under the exact same conditions, meaning some of this can be resolved by perspective. Having said that, there’s still clearly enough evidence to suggest the geometries are different between the wing being used in Spain and the sample from Miami.

The alterations would also make sense given the revised point load test, which now only permits 3mm of travel when a 60KG/60N load is applied to the elements, rather than the 5mm that was permissible during the eight previous rounds of the championship.

A reduction in that freedom of movement may require designers to rethink how they load the front wing elements, given there will now be a different response in high, medium and low speed corners.

Given that some of the downforce generating elements of the wing have been altered, it’s worth noting that the team have also made a substantial set of changes to the outboard section of the wing, in order that the outwash being generated isn’t being disproportionately affected.

This includes the flapped section where it intersects with the endplate, the geometry of which has also been altered to facilitate the required aerodynamic response, with a completely different, curved trailing edge design, rather than the flat edge previously employed (blue line, below).

The team have also increased the height of the lower rear corner cut out (arrowed), in order to expose the new vane structure that’s been added inboard, having opted to remove the inwardly curved flap tip solution they’d been using up until this point.

This vane structure is similar to the design we’ve seen other teams, such as Mercedes, use in the past, suggesting that the team have found a suitable way of incorporating those design elements into their own arrangement.

Read next: What you can really expect to see from the FIA’s new flexi-wing test