There was great jubilation in the Ferrari camp after Charles Leclerc’s emotional victory at his home race in Monaco six weeks ago. But the euphoria has waned ever since. While McLaren regularly challenges Red Bull and Mercedes took its first Formula 1 victory since 2022 in Austria last weekend, Ferrari is in a downward spiral.
The Scuderia only collected 39 points in the last three race weekends, with the best they managed to achieve being Carlos Sainz’s last podium finish in Spielberg. By comparison, McLaren collected 84 points in the same period and was able to reduce the gap to the Scuderia in the constructors’ championship to 23 points.
Ferrari suffers from increased bouncing
And this despite an extensive update package in Barcelona, from which Ferrari had actually hoped to achieve a performance leap. But with the update, the Red Goddess is again suffering from bouncing in high-speed corners, which could be solved with the setup, but would affect the balance in other corners. “The bouncing is the main problem at the moment,” Carlos Sainz openly admits. A problem that could become even more apparent this weekend given the numerous high-speed corners in Silverstone.
So have the Ferrari innovations failed? No, insists Charles Leclerc: “As I have said several times: the numbers we expected from the upgrade are there. So the upgrade is working as it should.” According to Leclerc, the devil is in the details. In concrete terms, Ferrari has so far simply failed to get the SF-24 into the right working window with the updates. “We have so far struggled to find the right place for the new package, where it is optimal for us to maximize the car’s potential,” explains Leclerc.
Ferrari with setup experiments: We have ideas in which direction we want to push
At least with regard to the severity of the problem, Leclerc gives the all-clear. According to the Monegasque, Ferrari’s challenges are not of a deeper nature, but can be solved in the short term. “We already have some ideas about which direction we want to push in, as we saw some big differences between the cars in the last race,” said Leclerc.
Leclerc gives the all-clear: Two, three tenths are in the car
If the hoped-for improvements come soon, Leclerc is at least confident that Ferrari will be able to get back on track quickly. The 26-year-old even believes that the fight for race wins will then be possible again. “Because we’re only talking about two to three tenths of a second, which makes a huge difference these days,” Leclerc calculates. “And if you put that in context, especially with the problems we’re facing at the moment, I’m confident that if we no longer have these problems and optimize our package, those two or three tenths will be in the car.”
“We just need to find those tenths and get the car consistently in the right window,” Leclerc continued. “In the last two races we’ve struggled to achieve that.”
Sainz, meanwhile, is not quite as optimistic as his teammate. Unlike Leclerc, the Spaniard still has doubts about sustainable progress as a result of the Ferrari update: “The new package certainly still has potential for optimization. But in the short term we want to understand whether we have taken a step in the right direction or not. Because that will also help future developments.”
Sainz: Performance gap a cause for concern
“We accept and recognise that since Barcelona we have been less competitive than before Barcelona,” Sainz continued. “And that obviously raises a bit of concern about the package. We certainly have to try to understand as much as possible, everything that comes with it. We want to tackle this task for the future, but at the same time the others are not standing still and are improving exponentially. So we have to try to keep up with that.”
Overall, Sainz points out that handling the complex ground-effect cars is more complicated than in the past. This applies both to the drivers on the track and to the engineers during development. “It’s not so clear that five or ten points of downforce will make the car faster, because sometimes it creates problems elsewhere,” says Sainz. “It’s a very challenging regulation period. Everyone on this grid has had problems with these upgrades at one point or another.”
Despite the fundamental performance problems, Ferrari, in the person of Carlos Sainz, was at least able to finish on the podium in Austria. The reason for this was the controversial collision between Lando Norris and Max Verstappen in the battle for victory, which was also the topic of discussion on Thursday in Silverstone. Norris was much more reserved in his comments than he had been shortly after the collision. You can read all the details in this article: