Getting to grips with Ferrari’s “very sharp car” is now a top priority for Carlos Sainz to avoid a repeat of the problems in 2024. Ferrari has been struggling with excessive tire wear and a lack of consistency in race pace since the start of the 2023 season.
That means Scuderia are struggling to convert their often impressive qualifying pace over a full Grand Prix distance into consistent race pace.
The team has only had three podiums so far, all thanks to Charles Leclerc, who achieved two of his three first places from pole position.
According to team-mate Carlos Sainz, who has not yet been able to repeat his best result of the season, fourth place in the opening race in Bahrain, Ferrari has the car’s core problems under control. But now it is important to understand the wild inconstant so that the problem does not carry over to the vehicle of 2024.
He concedes that the SF-23 remains a “very sharp car” with a small working window, making it very difficult for the team to predict which tracks it will be good at.
“We have understood the core problem of the car”
“We understood the core problem of the car,” said Sainz ahead of the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort this weekend. “Since the first developments this year, we have tried to improve it. And the whole development program is focused on improving this key weakness that we have.”
“I think it’s no longer a secret that we’ve lost a certain consistency in the car this year,” said the Spaniard. “It’s very difficult to predict which tracks we’ll be fast on and which ones we won’t.”
“There’s the susceptibility to wind and the sensitivity to track temperature that makes the car an inconsistent one at the moment,” he says.
“The best example was the difference between Hungary and Spa. In Hungary we were expecting a good weekend, in Spa a weaker one. It shows that maybe there’s something that we don’t fully understand and that we can’t predict very well.”
Ferrari: experiments in training
Sainz explains that Ferrari will now use each Friday practice session of the remaining ten races this year to experiment with the set-up and find more answers that can help the car for 2024: “We have twelve races behind us and still have ten to understand everything.”
“That unpredictability, that lack of understanding is what we’re focusing on right now to try and put it all together. And that’s what we’re going to focus on this weekend and of course the second half of the season,” said Sainz.
“Every weekend we try something different in practice to understand the regulations and find out where we have deficits compared to Red Bull and how we can make the car faster for 2024.”
“I think we’re doing a pretty good job trying different things and having different theories that we put together for next year’s car,” he says.
Formula 1: Leclerc hopes for consistency
Teammate Leclerc points out that Ferrari aren’t the only team to struggle with dramatic swings in form this year. If the Italians get their inconsistency under control, they could dramatically improve their results in the close fight behind the dominant Red Bulls.
“The short-term goal is to improve our consistency because if you look at the first part of the season and you look at McLaren, Mercedes, Aston Martin and us, they’re all very inconsistent,” he says.
“In one race McLaren is ahead by a large margin and in the next race we or Mercedes are ahead,” said Leclerc. “If we manage to find what we have in the car that gives us the consistency to always be up front, then we have a huge advantage over the other teams and that’s what we have to focus on now.”