FERRARI’S UPGRADE VERDICT MAKES THIS LETDOWN MORE PUZZLING
Considering it had a deficit of over three tenths to the lead Ferrari and lead Red Bull, and its drivers were just 0.005s apart, the Ferrari is either Formula 1’s fourth-quickest car at Barcelona or, at the very best, a marginal third.
This is worse than it would’ve been expected to go at the Spanish Grand Prix on the overall trend of the season. But, given it introduced a major upgrade at Barcelona, that at least offers a clear potential reason. Surely the new version of the SF-24 is coming up short somewhere, either through miscorrelation or just not being fully optimised?
Leclerc dug his weekend out from a sketchy place after “a very difficult time” on Friday – and was lucky to escape penalty for a major FP3 indiscretion. But though he was “a bit late getting into the rhythm”, he felt he was in that rhythm come qualifying – the laptime just didn’t come.
“The pace is just not there,” he remarked, bluntly. “I am happy in a way with the progress, of the feeling I had from yesterday to today, which I think will pay off in the race. I am not happy – and I am disappointed – with the pace of the car today in qualifying, because we are further away than what we had anticipated.”
But the upgrade, encompassing a new high-downforce rear wing and beam wing set-up plus changes to the sidepods and floor? That’s working, he claimed.
“The upgrade that we brought is doing what it’s supposed to do. It’s a good step forward,” Leclerc insisted.
“There’s more optimisation with this new package that we can do – but I wouldn’t take that as an excuse. I think we are just lacking a little bit of pace this weekend.
“It felt good [to drive].
“What I can say is that this upgrade was a performance upgrade and not a driveability [ride quality] upgrade. So… what we’ve seen is bringing performance to the car, for sure, 100%. And we are seeing the numbers that we expected.”
Leclerc acknowledged it’s “always a relative sport”, but didn’t seem to put much stock in the idea that perhaps the likes of McLaren and Mercedes have simply been even more aggressive with their developments.
