F1 calendar in May not helping Ferrari understand SF-23 issues: "Answers expected from Spain"

F1 calendar in May not helping Ferrari understand SF-23 issues: “Answers expected from Spain”. F1 calendar in May not helping Ferrari.

Miami, back to reality
[Press review] – Only one podium achieved in the first five races of the 2023 Formula One season. This is the meager result collected by Ferrari at the start of the 2023 F1 championship. After the smiles in Baku thanks to Charles Leclerc’s pole positions in the Sprint and Sunday race, with the Monegasque talent also confirming himself as the best non-Red Bull driver in both races, the trip to Miami across the ocean brought back doubts and problems.

Confusion and mixed feelings
Both Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz seemed far from comfortable on the red single-seater, which was unresponsive, often understeered and unable to work properly with different tire compounds. In Miami, for example, Carlos Sainz showed excellent pace on the medium tires and then fell back after switching to hard tires. A different story for Charles Leclerc, who, in a desperate attempt to increase the limited performance of his car, relied entirely on an extreme setup that did not pay off as expected.

Significant updates are expected on the SF-23 in the upcoming races, but as correctly emphasized by Fulvio Solms in his analysis for the Italian daily newspaper Corriere dello Sport, whose excerpt is provided below, the main innovations and also the most significant answers can only come in a month, on the occasion of the Spanish GP in Barcelona.

Magmatic ground
“Even the calendar works against Ferrari. […] it is a fact […] that today Ferrari needs to run on a testing track, even a linear one, so that engineers can understand what is happening on the SF-23 […]. […] the ideal track remains Montmelò, an open-air wind tunnel […]. In Maranello, they no longer know what to think: in Miami they had a strong car in qualifying and a slow one in the race, Charles Leclerc struggling with the medium tires and being comfortable with the hard ones, while for Carlos Sainz it was the exactly the opposite, both with oversteer and understeer from one corner to the next. A disaster […]. Unfortunately, the Spanish GP will come too late […]. It is therefore necessary to continue moving on magmatic ground for another month […].”