Waiting for Ferrari
The SF-23 challenger which was presented on February 14th proved to be fast and constant on a single lap in the three days of pre-season testing at the Bahrain International Circuit, a good starting point which the Maranello team we will have to work on during the upcoming championship.
There is no doubt that Max Verstappen’s Red Bull Honda presents itself at the starting line of the new Formula 1 campaign as the single-seater to beat and in Sakhir it impressed rivals and insiders with its great stability and excellent balance. The decision to change the philosophy on the height of the rear seems to have further strengthened the Anglo-Austrian car, credited – according to Mercedes sources – with a lower rear by as much as 10 mm compared to the competition.
But a project designed well is not a guarantee of victory, and Ferrari learned it the hard way in the previous season. In fact, the F1-75 had clearly less development margins than the Red Bull RB18, which was in difficulty at the beginning of the 2022 season but then constantly improved as the championship progressed, up to the point of clearly dominating the second part of the season.
Charles Leclerc’s motivation
In this scenario, Ferrari fans await Charles Leclerc with hope, in his fifth season in Maranello. At the age of 25, the Monegasque feels ready to fight for the world championship, together with the entire team. Charles made it clear that he can aim for nothing less than the world tite: “Second position is not enough. We were very critical of ourselves at the end of last year and set ourselves the goal of improving in every area. Only by giving our all together can we win the world championship” – he pointed out.
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In the interesting interview granted to the Beyond the Grid podcast, the Monegasque shared his initial thoughts on the car with which he will face the 2023 Formula 1 championship: “It is still very early to evaluate how fast the SF-23 is, the first days of testing are used to do various tests and to collect data to correlate with what we expected. Everything we wanted we got on the track. There were no big surprises and lap after lap we worked more and more on the set-up. Not having problems with the car was important and now we can focus on improving the overall feeling.” – the Monegasque driver explained.
In recent days, Charles Leclerc revealed that he had to change his driving style a bit and this means that he will go to the race scheduled for Sunday still looking for the best set-up: “We are talking only about initial impressions, we are not yet in the optimal window of use for our car. The feeling is quite similar to the end of last year and some things should help the performance of the SF-23, for example at the floor level. The engineers have worked well to cope with the regulation changes for 2023. I’m not worried about bouncing or porpoising, we tried different configurations in the tests,” concluded the Ferrari driver during the Beyond the Grid podcast, with just a few days until the first round of the 2023 Formula 1 season, the Bahrain Grand Prix.
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