“Before the weekend and after Friday’s training, I thought that we could be the second force here in Jeddah,” says Carlos Sainz. But after the second race of the 2023 Formula 1 season in Saudi Arabia, disillusionment set in for the Spaniard and his team: Ferrari was only fourth behind Red Bull, Aston Martin and Mercedes over the distance.
Ferrari lap times have plummeted, especially on hard tires, says Sainz: “This last stint shows that we’re not where we want to be. Our tire wear is still greater than at Mercedes or Aston Martin, and we’re lacking in racing trim give us a bit of pace too.”
And that means after 50 laps of the Jeddah Corniche Circuit: Sainz loses 35 seconds to race winner Sergio Perez in the Red Bull and sees the finish 4.8 seconds behind Lewis Hamilton in the Mercedes, finishing sixth, about 7.2 seconds ahead of Ferrari- Teammate Charles Leclerc, who in turn only has a 9.6 second buffer on Alpine.
The last stint proves the Ferrari problem
For Sainz, this result is proof “that we still have a lot of work ahead of us,” he says after the Grand Prix. “We have a weakness in the race and we have to wait for developments to see if we can improve there.”
Leclerc also looks served: “We didn’t have the pace today to be eligible for something better. That was the best that was possible. There wasn’t much more in the car. Overall, the pace is not good enough.”
Especially in traffic, in the so-called dirty air behind other vehicles, Ferrari didn’t do a trick in Jeddah. Sainz puts it drastically: “If we overheat the tires even in clean air, then you only have to imagine what happens when we drive behind other cars. Then we literally eat up the tires! We need free driving when we’re halfway want to set decent lap times.”
Leclerc on soft as the only bright spot in the race
The only ray of hope in the race was Leclerc’s “good first stint” on soft tires, say the drivers. Leclerc feels this part of the race, which brought him from P12 to P6, as “positive”, Ferrari team boss Frederic Vasseur the speed in qualifying over a fast lap. In this discipline, his racing team “made a step forward” and “increased the gap to Mercedes,” said Vasseur in an interview with “Sky”.
Now it’s a matter of analyzing the race trim. Vasseur: “There is no wonder world behind it.” Ferrari simply has to consistently develop the SF-23 and make it faster, “see where there is potential and where not,” he explains. And: “The basic package is okay, but we don’t get enough out of the car, which is also due to the tires.”
According to Sainz, understanding this weakness is the “key” to improving performance at Ferrari. “But we can’t perform any magic tricks to get the updates sooner. All I know is that the team is doing everything they can to get these updates out there. And with the updates, we’ll definitely get better race pace.”
What else went wrong at Ferrari
In Jeddah, however, Ferrari also had to contend with other factors: both drivers had just completed their tire change to hard when a safety car phase was called and the competition benefited from the pit stop.
The timing of the yellow phase is “of course frustrating,” says Leclerc. “But that’s the way it is.”
Sainz also regrets the timing of the safety car deployment just three laps after his stop and two after Leclerc’s tire change: “We had just set a slightly better pace and wanted an overcut against [Lance] try stroll. But: The result would probably not have been much different, as the last stint on Hard shows.”
Failed communication at Leclerc engineer
And Leclerc’s anger about the failed communication with his race engineer Xavier Marcos Padros quickly evaporated: During the safety car phase, Padros had informed him about a long-distance duel with Hamilton at short notice, so that Leclerc was no longer able to react when Hamilton left the pit lane in front of him returned to the track.
“I thought we were okay and not fighting anyone,” said Leclerc. “That’s why I left some buffers so I could put pressure on the tires again. But Xavi only told me before the first corner that we were going against Hamilton. That was too late to stay within the time limit.”
And so Sainz concludes with the words: “We just had problems. And yes, we know our weak points.”