Ferrari launched “very big investigation” into cause of disappointing French GP outcome. Ferrari is hard at work on the causes of its poor performance last weekend.

Scuderia Ferrari Spanish driver Carlos Sainz confirmed that the Maranello team is currently hard at work in order to identify and fix the causes of its poor performance in last weekend’s French Grand Prix.

Carlos and team mate Charles Leclerc both qualified in the top seven on Saturday at the Paul Ricard track, but then ended up outside the points zone in the race, as their handling deteriorated during the Grand Prix. Carlos Sainz saind the Italian side is unlikely to have a problem in the neat future and it is likely to remain a limitation at certain circuits on the calendar.

“It’s been only three days since we had the issue and obviously you can imagine as a team we were quite surprised by it. But in some way also we kind of knew we are exposed to this sort of degradation in the front tyres for a while now. It’s quite interesting to see how such a big factory, such a big organisation launched its plan to recover and to try and find out how we are going to try and tackle and solve this issue. I’ve been quite involved in all the meetings, in all the discussions to see how we can get it better. I’ve been spending these last three days in Maranello and we’ve definitely put together a plan for the short, medium and long term to try and see if we can get it better.” – he explained.

Scuderia Ferrari’s weakness is particularly acute at circuits where the front tyres are the biggest limitation on car performance, the Spanish driver explained: “Obviously Pirelli and ourselves have our simulations tools which say which circuits are more front-limited and which circuits are more rear-limited. So we know going into France it was a very front-limited circuits and we might struggle. On Friday it was actually pretty warm, the track was in decent condition and we didn’t see any indications that the front was going to be a limitation. But suddenly on Sunday with the track condition change it was a very big issue.” – Carlos added.

Due to restrictions on car development, Scuderia Ferrari team principal Mattia Binotto is aware that the team will not be able to fully fix their weakness this year.

“I agree with Mattia, it’s not like in three days we’re going to solve the problem,” said Sainz. “So we’re going to be exposed to conditions and to track changes. But we can do something to start learning. We need to experiment with different set-up directions, different configurations that we can put in the car to at least in the short term mitigate the problems and there’s already very big investigations being launched in the medium and long-term to try and solve the issue back at the factory.” – he concluded.