The Saudi Arabian Grand Prix weekend started uphill for Scuderia Ferrari and especially for Charles Leclerc, given the fact that the Monegasque driver will have to take a ten place grid penalty for a change of the ECU (the third used in the first two races of the 2023 Formula 1 campaign): however, the problem will not affect performance and Ferrari will not lower the power of his engines as a result of the two failures, as instead had happened at the beginning of the previous championship.
At best Charles Leclerc will start the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix from 11th place, and will have to be careful not to be involved in accidents during the race start and first lap.
In addition to reliability, the SF-23’s problems in terms of race pace have been discussed at length and go hand in hand with the limitations on the setup of the front; however, even in qualifying for the Bahrain Grand Prix, the SF-23 car did not shine – while remembering that Charles Leclerc did not carry out his final fast run in Q3: compared to 2022, Charles Leclerc’s time was lowered by less than six tenths, which leads us to think that compared to the simulations seen in Maranello, there are several tenths of pure performance missing. Some of these can be attributed to the difficulties encountered on the front which limited the engineers’ setup choices. As a result, Fred Vasseur confirmed that Ferrari will bring “small updates and we hope to have more in Melbourne”.
With front problems last year Red Bull RB18 lost several tenths, two to be exact both in qualifying and in the race, in the very fast first sector against the balanced F1-75. Now 12 months later the roles are reversed: in the case in which Ferrari fails to resolve the known problems, the loss in terms of time would be significant, and the SF-23 would also have to deal with the set-up limitations we saw in Bahrain.
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Mercedes has announced that it will debut some minor updates in Jeddah, but in Brackley all efforts are focused on the important package initially planned for Imola that Toto Wolff’s team intends to bring forward to Baku, if possible. A similar situation at McLaren: the Woking-based team started the 2023 Formula One season rather badly due to some delays in the MCL60 project and while waiting for the big package expected for Baku, “some minor updates will debut in Saudi Arabia and Australia” according to Andrea Stella.
On the grid, we will most likely see more unloaded wings, as happened last year between Bahrain and Jeddah: Scuderia Ferrari’s decision to mount a more loaded wing for fear of degradation did not pay off. However, in view of the many battles on the track, being faster than its rivals at the end of the straights could be the key to gaining positions in the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix at the Jeddah Corniche circuit.
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