Ferdinando Cannizzo, Head of Ferrari Endurance Race Cars, delves into details on the Prancing Horse’s preparations for its FIA World Endurance Championship title defence, which begins this weekend on home soil in Italy.
As FIA WEC descends upon the iconic Autodromo Internazionale Enzo e Dino Ferrari for the 6 Hours of Imola, Ferdinando Cannizzo, Head of Ferrari Endurance Race Cars, tells fiawec.com that the Prancing Horse’s stellar 2025 season is already a thing of the past. “In endurance racing as in any competition, previous success guarantees nothing; if anything, it raises the bar.”
Locking out the top three spots in the Drivers’ Championships and securing the Manufacturers’ crown, as well as the World Cup for Hypercar Teams with AF Corse, won’t change Ferrari’s philosophy of humility and discipline, nor its willingness to reconsider every detail from zero in terms of both car performance and team operations. “Our target will be to extract the absolute maximum from the package we have today, race after race,” Cannizzo notes. “Our approach is the same that allowed us to build the foundations of last season’s results.”
Although Ferrari’s approach is similar to in 2025, the same cannot be said about its 499P Hypercar, following the FIA and ACO’s request for a complete aerodynamic re-homologation. The process was to reposition every car within a new performance window.
Cannizzo – who held senior engineering roles in the Scuderia Ferrari F1 team in its golden years in the early 2000s – and his team had to strike the right balance between adapting to the new window and finding incremental gains without altering the vehicle concept. “We focused on details, particularly on the underfloor and front and rear-end devices like gurneys and flicks. The goal was twofold – to preserve the strengths of the existing aero map and exploit this mandatory reset to refine certain behaviours of the car.”
Nevertheless, Ferrari didn’t go down the path of using EVO jokers this winter, unlike many of its Hypercar opponents, as Cannizzo believes many improvements come from optimisation rather than redesign. The graduate in aeronautical engineering from the University of Pisa explains how, over the winter, the team analysed the 2025 season ‘corner-by-corner, sector-by-sector’, specifically at the few races where the Prancing Horse struggled more.
“The work was focused on investigating the areas of set-up domain not yet explored, trying to understand if and how those unused set-ups could represent an improvement on a specific track, if not on peak performance, on consistency and tyre management,” Cannizzo adds. “Performance is the sum of countless small details, most of which are not visible externally. That is where we concentrated our efforts.”
One area where Ferrari could be on the back foot is the introduction of the Michelin Pilot Sport Endurance tyres. While some of its rivals have already logged race mileage under these new specifications, the team enters the season having not yet completed a fully structured test programme. “The recent tests we carried out in Qatar and at Imola gave us some useful indications, and we made good progress in matching our car with the new tyre range, but we still have work to do.”
While the car and tyres have changed, Ferrari’s greatest asset may reside in its stability. The factory entries’ driver line-ups remain unchanged for the fourth consecutive year, a rarity in the high-stakes world of Hypercar racing. “Stability allows us to work with a shared language and a deep understanding of both the car and the processes.” says Cannizzo. “The human and personal relationship created between the whole team and the drivers is something that goes beyond the simple professional relationship. This makes the working atmosphere always very pleasant and, sometimes, even jovial.”
The atmosphere will surely be jovial this weekend on the green hills of Emilia-Romagna as FIA WEC returns to the Autodromo Internazionale Enzo e Dino Ferrari, which is only an hour’s drive east of Maranello. “Imola is always special, but arriving as world champions makes it even more emotional,” Cannizzo acknowledges. “Of course, we want to begin the season in the right way, in front of our supporters.”
Looking beyond the Imola round, the Hypercar field will rely on just two six-hour races to prepare for FIA WEC’s flagship round, the 24 Hours of Le Mans, where Ferrari reigns supreme with a three-peat of wins since 2023. Cannizzo doesn’t believe that either the calendar tweaks – due to the postponement of the Qatar 1812km – nor Ferrari’s recent record at La Sarthe should change the team’s preparation for the greatest endurance race in the world.
“Everything we do in the early races must be targeted not only at optimising the performance for Imola and Spa, but also at gathering reliable inputs for our simulation, knowing that the car configuration and optimal set-up at a high-efficiency track such as Le Mans are completely different from those that we use at the other tracks in the championship.”
The 2026 championship will be even more competitive than in 2025, Cannizzo predicts, considering that Genesis Magma Racing has joined the chasing Hypercar pack and that many manufacturers have used the aero re-homologation period to introduce significant updates, some with performance jokers. “We expect very tight races, constant adaptation to evolving track and tyre conditions, and a season where operational precision will be just as decisive as pure performance. We arrive in 2026 fully aware of the challenge ahead. We know we will be the reference point for many of our competitors, and that motivates us.”
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