Scuderia Ferrari Monegasque driver Charles Leclerc is confident that the Maranello team has now gained a much clearer understanding of the bouncing issue that has recently hindered its Formula 1 performance.
Last winter, the Italian side successfully addressed the unpredictable behavior that plagued the SF-24’s predecessor, creating a car that briefly positioned itself as Red Bull’s primary challenger in the start. After Charles Leclerc’s victory in Monaco closed the gap to Red Bull to just 24 points, Ferrari’s form has since slipped, dropping them to third behind McLaren in the standings.
The Maranello team’s decline has been linked to an upgrade introduced in Spain, which included a redesigned floor that led to severe bouncing at high speeds. To address this, Ferrari reverted to the pre-Barcelona setup for Silverstone’s high-speed circuit and introduced further revisions in Hungary to mitigate the issue.
Despite a lackluster performance in Belgium, where Charles Leclerc finished a disappointing third, Ferrari acknowledged that more substantial changes are needed. Nonetheless, Charles Leclerc, who has experimented with aggressive setups to resolve the problem, remains optimistic that the Italian side has made real progress with its latest developments.
“From Spain onwards, I think this was more the turning point where we brought something on the car, which the numbers were there,” the Monegasque driver recently explained in an interview for Autosport – “However, it induced quite a lot of bouncing that we’ve been struggling with. And on my side, specifically, I went very aggressive in the last four races with set-up, especially, trying to find solutions for that. I’ve always been [aiming] to go for the last hundredths, and I think this is the approach that pays off whenever things are as they should be. Whenever you have a car, that is bouncing, for example, you cannot go too close to the limit because the car is doing more unpredictable things, and you’ve got to keep more margin.” – he added.
“Which is something that I know I’m a bit… yes, it’s not my approach, and so always, I’m going to pay a little bit more of the price whenever these things happen. However, I don’t think that this was the main issue in the last few races. It was more about putting the car in very extreme places in order to get something out of it and to understand. That was the main reason for the lack of performance in the last few races. I will put that mostly on bouncing. The bouncing is what created the inconsistencies that we have seen in the last few races, and made us struggle a bit more than before that.” – the Monegasque driver continued.
Charles Leclerc has likened the tests he’s undertaken in 2024 to the experiments that sparked Ferrari’s late-season turnaround last year.
“I remember last year we had two races like that, and it started in Zandvoort where we decided, okay, maybe Zandvoort is not going to be the race for us. But we want to learn as much as possible in order to get better after that. I’m sure that this is the same process we have gone through in the last three, four races. However, the negative point about it is that we’ve lost three, four races instead of two last year. But I believe that that gave us a much deeper understanding of what was happening, and I’m confident to say that we’ve learned a lot.” – Scuderia Ferrari Monegasque driver Charles Leclerc concluded.
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