If the first round in Bahrain hadn’t been a great start for Ferrari, the second round in Saudi Arabia didn’t end up being as positive as the Italian team had been hoping for.
An overall great Saturday had seen Charles Leclerc scoring the second best time, just behind pole sitter Sergio Perez, allowing his teammate Carlos Sainz to start in P4.
The race had started on a positive note for the Scuderia, with Leclerc quickly making his way up to the top 5 after being the first driver to take a penalty for new components in 2023 on soft tyres and Sainz’s pace on medium looking rather promising.
However, the second stint on hards was disappointing for both drivers, who ended the race in P6 and P7, behind Alonso and Mercedes.
Team Principal Frederic Vasseur is definitely not satisfied with the team’s performance, although there were some improvements to the first round of the season, as he said in the post race press conference:
“I don’t want to push on the positive side, because the outcome of the weekend is not good and we have to be focused on what is going wrong, not on the positive.
Ferrari’s biggest strength is definitely still the one lap performance needed for qualifying session.
“But I have to keep in mind, to do a proper analysis, of what is going well and I think that qualifying went pretty well.
“For sure we always want to do a better job, and it was difficult to know exactly what was the potential of the Red Bull because Max [Verstappen] didn’t do the Q3.”
After seeing the Red Bulls and Alonso monopolising the top three spots during the earlier practise session, to end up on the front row on Saturday had seemed an improvement in the right direction:
“At least I had the feeling that compared to Mercedes and Aston Martin we did a step forward. We were one [tenth off,] they were three and four, I think, and I think we are on the right way in terms of development.”
In Vasseur’s opinion, the main struggle the drivers and the team are facing at the moment is being able and in the conditions to always extract the best performance possible out of the SF-23, which he believes it hasn’t happened in yesterday’s race:
“But potential is one thing, and I think on the potential side we did a decent step. The issue is we have to stay at this maximum potential all over the weekend, and it’s not what we are doing today.
“I think on some occasions we are there. But on some occasions, or some stints of the weekend, we are not able to be at the maximum of our possibility.”
The former Alfa Romeo Team Principal then recalled the dynamics of the race, commenting on the better first half and the issues found by both drivers on the harder compound:
“The first stint went pretty well and Charles had a good comeback, but he was with the soft, and nobody knows about the different compound.”
“Carlos was in a decent pace on the first stint with the medium, compared to the others, but we lost completely the ground with the hard [tyre]. “
“It’s where we have to understand that the main issue is. If we have some improvement to do, it’s clearly on the management of the different compounds,” Vasseur summed up highlighting the heart of the problem.
Asked on what will he tell his engineers, he had no doubts: “To not bullshit ourselves.
“The most important thing in this kind of situation is to know where we are going well and what we are doing wrong. But we cannot bullshit ourselves. We have to change.
“We have to understand where we are wrong, and we have to push. It is not [enough] to speak, we will not be faster like this.
“For me the picture is quite clear. The potential of the car is good, but it’s not enough compared to Red Bull, because we are not able to extract the maximum from the car every time,” he concluded.
Photo credits: Scuderia Ferrari
