Ahead of the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix race weekend, Scuderia Ferrari was confident that the track characteristics of the Jeddah Corniche circuit would help the Maranello team make a step forward and get closer to rivals Red Bull following the poor performance seen in the first round of the 2023 Formula 1 campaign, the Bahrain Grand Prix.
Unfortunately, not only did Ferrari not improve, but their were even far behind in terms of race pace. Charles Leclerc was able to deliver a solid qualifying time, which was good enough for P2, but had to to take a ten-second grid penalty and started the race from 12th place. Despite a relatively good race pace on the first stint with soft tyres, which was partially masked by the fact that the rest of the grid was using medium or hard tyres, both Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc fell away on the hard compound following the pitstops and finished the race in P6 and P7, unable to challenge even Mercedes and Red Bull in Jeddah.
The result and most importantly the performance are extremely disappointing for the Maranello team, one year after the Italian side had fought Max Verstappen until the final lap for the race win in Saudi Arabia. Ferrari team boss Frederic Vasseur admitted that it was now very important for the Scuderia to thoroughly analyze what went wrong at the Jeddah circuit and not to pretend things were better than they actually are.
When quizzed about would be the first thing he will ask the Maranello engineers after the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, Fred Vasseur replied: “To not bullshit ourselves. The most important thing in this kind of situation is to know where we are going well and what we are doing wrong. But we cannot bullshit ourselves. We have to change. We have to understand where we are wrong, and we have to push. It’s not [good enough] to speak, we will not be faster like this. For me the picture is quite clear. The potential of the car is good, but it’s not enough compared to Red Bull, because we are not able to extract the maximum from the car every time.” – the French manager explained.
Frederic Vasseur feels the critical aspect where Ferrari encountered difficulties in this second round of the season was its management of the different Pirelli tyre compounds, with a key focus on the pace with the hards.
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“The first stint went pretty well and Charles had a good comeback, but he was with the soft [tyre] and nobody knows about the different compound. Carlos was in a decent pace on the first stint with the medium, compared to the others, but we lost completely the ground with the hard [tyre]. It’s where we have to understand that the main issue is. If we have some improvement to do, it’s clearly on the management of the different compound.”
The Ferrari boss remains confident that the 2023 car has the baseline required to recover the gap and challenge for race wins this season, but at the same time he believes the Maranello team does not have the ability for it to run at its peak during a whole race weekend.
The Frenchman feels the qualifying pace shown by the SF-23 shows that it has the potential to get close to Red Bull. Yet he pointed out that critical to the Italian side delivering this championship is in it being able to unleash that type of potential during the full race weekend, nit just on Saturday:
“I don’t want to push on the positive side, because the outcome of the weekend is not good and we have to be focused on what is going wrong, not on the positives. But I have to keep in mind, to do a proper analysis, of what is going well and I think that qualifying went pretty well. For sure we always want to do a better job, and it was difficult to know exactly what was the potential of the Red Bull because Max [Verstappen] didn’t do the Q3. But at least I had the feeling that compared to Mercedes and Aston Martin we did a step forward. We were one=tenth off, [in qualifying] they were three and four [tenths] I think, and I think we are on the right way in terms of development. But potential is one thing, and I think on the potential side we did a decent step. The issue is we have to stay at this maximum potential all over the weekend, and it’s not what we are doing today [Sunday]. I think on some occasions we are there. But on some occasions, or some stints of the weekend, we are not able to be at the maximum of our possibility.” – the Ferrari boss concluded.
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