The Maranello-based team has been hugely criticised throughout the season. With a new Team Principal at the forefront heading into 2023, the hopes were to see improvements during the season and victories that did not come.
The Ferrari drivers talked about the changes coming in Barcelona and the work done behind closed doors to try and rescue their season somewhat.
“You cannot imagine the effort Maranello has done in trying to bring this package forward,” said Carlos Sainz.
“It was supposed to come a lot later in the season and the whole factory was just flat-out these last few months, because of the situation, to try and bring it earlier.
“You’ve seen it hasn’t been an easy start to the season and we’ve been struggling. But it is true that with this first step into this direction, we try and correct the deficiencies we have.”
The goal is to take the car in a new direction, making it consistent and able to mitigate its weaknesses. As shown in Miami especially, the SF-23 has been a nightmare to drive at times.
“We also know that this upgrade is not going to change our life from one race to another. It’s the first step of many steps to come still.”
Arriving from a difficult home weekend, his teammate, Charles Leclerc, spoke about how the team does not expect miracles to happen with the updates.
“In Monaco, I’m happy with the way we managed our race. There were choices that were made, with the benefit of hindsight you would change those but, at the time, I think it was the right thing to do.
“There was the mistake on qualifying, this is something we looked into for it to not happen again.”
“We are not expecting any big miracles, to be honest. From now on, we want to try and bring some small upgrades every race. This one should go in the right direction, but I don’t think it will be a massive change.
“The thing is that we have an extremely peaky car. In qualifying, on the one-lap pace with new tyres, the wind, we know exactly how to drive the car, it’s okay. But as soon as we go a little bit out of those conditions we lose so much downforce, overall. We have been working a lot on that with this new car, so this will help us, to not gain that much performance, but to at least be a bit more consistent throughout the weekend, which hopefully will help us to have a better result on the Sunday.”
The Barcelona weekend will be decisive for the future path of the iconic Italian team, to see how much the changes brought in can actually improve the rest of the season, according to the Monegasque.
“Barcelona is the best track to understand exactly where you are with the car. So I think it’s really good to have these new upgrades here and to understand where are, we so we can confirm still our weaknesses.
“I think in our mind, even though we’ve had very different tracks, it’s very clear for us where we need to work, and that is mostly on race pace and having a car that is a bit easier to drive. I think this is a perfect track to see whether this upgrade is going in the right direction or not.”
Photo credit: Scuderia Ferrari
