Due to the cancellation of the Chinese Grand Prix, the Melbourne round will lead to the first break of the 2023 Formula 1 season. The results of the Australian weekend will add up to the previous two races, drawing a picture that will greatly influence the work planned in the following three weeks.
A sort of last call to define the direction that developments will take, destined to lead to more or less drastic choices in the top management of teams that have not scored results up to expectations. One of the teams still grappling with problems understanding the single-seater is Scuderia Ferrari, which arrives in Australia after two bitter disappointing races.
In the Scuderia garage, they have not yet reached drastic conclusions like those made by the Mercedes garage and there is a reason. The potential of the SF-23 is still a question to be answered, the gap against Red Bull is very big, but it’s one thing to find yourself behind Sergio Perez and Max Verstappen, it’s quite another to leave Jeddah as the fourth fastest car on the track.
“We went well in qualifying – explained Frederic Vasseur after the race – we didn’t have any balance problems, I think in that situation we managed to get the most out of the car. And also in the race, with the softs (mounted by Charles Leclerc in the first stint) and the mediums (used by Carlos Sainz) we didn’t go badly. But we struggled a lot more with the hard tyres, I don’t know if it was due to the track temperature, which dropped, or to the management of the compound”.
Ferrari arrived in Jeddah with the nagging problem of tire degradation that emerged overwhelmingly in Bahrain. A problem that the technicians tackled with the highest priority, planning the work in the Saudi free practice to be able to obtain good management of the soft and medium tires in view of the 50 laps scheduled for Sunday.
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However, the Scuderia technicians may have gone a little further, validating a set-up that is actually good for the two softer compounds but which turned out to be unsuitable for the hard ones. Soft and Medium remained very close in terms of performance, while the C2s confirmed a gap of about eight tenths.
The impression is that once the hard tires were mounted, the Ferrari SF-23 cars weren’t able to generate enough energy to allow the C2 to work in the best conditions, and in fact both Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz didn’t show any degradation, but complained of a lack of grip.
Previously, the hard tire had only been used in the FP1 session, with a track eleven degrees hotter than the values recorded in the race, and this variable may have led the Scuderia technicians to evaluate the functioning of the hard tire on the basis of that feedback.
Fred Vasseur’s words seem to confirm this scenario, ie the doubt that something went wrong in Jeddah beyond the potential of the single-seater. The margins for improvement are obviously not such as to allow even thinking about Red Bull, but they become crucial in the fight for the role of second fastest car, and this answer will come from the Melbourne weekend, the last chance before the three-week break.
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