Ferrari endured a torrid Sunday at the Miami Grand Prix as Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc limped to P5 and P7 respectively.
Photo credit: Scuderia Ferrari
On Saturday afternoon, both drivers looked like they could challenge for pole position. Yesterday they were nowhere on race pace and failed to match Aston Martin and Mercedes.
A promising first stint for Sainz on mediums suggested he could challenge Fernando Alonso for P3, but he fell away horribly on the hard tyre as he lost all kinds of speed. The Spanish driver even lost out to George Russell.
For Charles Leclerc, it was even more difficult. He was already struggling on mediums in the opening stint and got overtaken by Kevin Magnussen in the Haas at one point. The hard tyre wasn’t much better. He was overtaken by Lewis Hamilton in the closing laps.
Speaking about the difficulties post-race, Leclerc explained the balance can change in the same corner from oversteer to understeer or vice versa.
“I was just speaking just now with Carlos and what we are lacking is consistency in the car,” he stated. “It’s not even from corner to corner, it’s just in the same corner.
“I can have a huge oversteery balance and then a huge understeery balance, and our car is so wind-affected.”
The Monegasque crashed twice this weekend as both Ferrari drivers were in survival mode on race day.
Leclerc says it’s difficult to trust and have confidence in the package when it is changing so often throughout a race. The unpredictability of what is going to happen on different compounds isn’t helping, too.
“We’re going from one compound to the other and we never know what’s going to happen on the new compound,” said Leclerc.
“It’s always an unknown whether the car is going to react well, whether the tyres are going to be in the right window.
“This is just very difficult also as a driver to gain the confidence and to adapt your driving because you get from one set to the other and the car is completely in a different window.”
Ferrari had looked like they made improvements with tyre management and performance in Melbourne and Baku.
Carlos Sainz was running in a strong P4 in Australia before the late red flag changed everything. In Baku, Leclerc was P2 in the sprint and P3 in the main race as he showed strong speed and tyre management versus Alonso.
However, yesterday was a rude awakening.
“We sometimes feel like we’ve done a step forward and then you arrive in some very particular conditions,” Leclerc added.
“It’s warmer than the other races and now we are completely out of the right window of the tyre.
“We need to work on that.”
