A disappointing first Grand Prix in the 2023 Formula One championship was then followed by ten days of rumors, controversies and rumours for Scuderia Ferrari, but from tomorrow the Maranello team has a new opportunity to prove everyone wrong on the track, as the Italian side arrives in Jeddah to try to turn things around in this start of the season.
The clear goal which was set before the beginning of the Formula 1 campaign was to fight for both world championships and this cannot already change, however disappointing the performance of the Ferrari SF-23 car was in the first round (out of twenty-three), in Bahrain.
According to Ferrari team principal Frederic Vasseur, the Ferrari SF-23 has a lot of potential: the Maranello team therefore needs to be able to extract it by working better with the setup and finding a balance that has never been optimal in Bahrain. Even if the French manager downplayed any major issues, there was intense work going on in technical department to improve the SF-23, after three days of disappointing tests.
A new front wing makes its debut in Jeddah to fix understeer.
At the Sakhir circuit, the Scuderia had to face several unexpected events. The most serious is certainly the retirement of Charles Leclerc due to reliability problems that will cost him ten penalty positions at the Jeddah Corniche circuit. The performance was influenced by an exasperated understeer and the early triggering of porpoising compared to the initial predictions that were coming out of the Maranello simulation tools and instruments. These two conditions prevented the use of optimal set-ups tested on the simulator, forcing the Maranello team to make a compromise that penalized the mechanical setup and not only directly on the track, as explained by F1 experts Piergiuseppe Donadoni and Paolo D’Alessandro for formu1a.uno.
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These worrying issues had already emerged during the pre-season testing session, with Charles Leclerc who, not surprisingly, had made it clear that he was not fully at ease with the front of his SF-23. “I had to change my driving style a bit, but let’s say we’re finding the way.” – the Monegasque driver pointed out on the last day of testing. The important data analysis and simulator work allowed Charles Leclerc to find his way in the Bahrain race weekend. This is demonstrated by the excellent qualifying and race pace, even though the pace compared to Red Bull was still very poor on Sunday.
After seeing that the Ferrari SF-23 was not showing the excellent performance of the simulator on the track, developments in Maranello accelerated. Ahead of winter testing, there were no updates scheduled for the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix weekend. However, to allow for a better balance and better setup optimization, solving or in any case limiting the problems encountered in Bahrain, a new front wing will make its debut in Jeddah.
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