Scuderia Ferrari Monegasque driver Charles Leclerc started the first round of the 2023 Formula 1 championship, the Bahrain Grand Prix, from third place and, thanks to a new set of soft tyres he saved at the end of Q3, Charles managed to overtake the Red Bull of Sergio Perez at the start of the race.
However it was only a temporary situation, as the pace of the SF-23 car did now allow the Monegasque to pull away from the Mexican or get close to Max Verstappen, who was comfortably leading the race. Charles Leclerc lost second place against the much faster RB19 of Sergio Perez and was at least heading to a third place finish at the Bahrain International Circuit. But things took a turn for the worse on lap 40, when the Monegasque suffered a technical failure and was forced to park the car on the side of the track.
“It’s not good enough. We are far from Red Bull, so we need to push and understand what did they find during this break because they are on another planet on race pace. I mean, for now, we don’t know. We are fast in qualifying, but we are not fast in the race, and it’s not by a little. So I think Red Bull found something big somewhere, and we need to find that. It is very difficult to understand because obviously, the car from quali to race is not changing at all. But for some reason on one lap we are very close to them, and in the race we are a second away in some parts of the race. It’s crazy, the difference, so we need to look into it.” Charles Leclerc replied, when asked by the media about Scuderia Ferrari’s result and performance in the Bahrain Grand Prix.
When it was pointed out to him that the Maranello team has made improvements in terms of straight-line speed, Charles Leclerc replied that “yes, but we are lacking in corners now.”
One major problem for the Italian side in Bahrain was the greater tyre degradation as compared to rivals Red Bull in terms of race pace, which was also a big issue for Ferrari in the second part of the 2022 Formula 1 championship, a weakness that does not seem to have been addressed ahead of the new season.
The Maranello team felt last year that the tyre wear was also influenced by the fact that Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz were forced to push harder in races tot try and limit the gap to a much faster Red Bull, and Charles Leclerc admitted that it was a similar situation in Bahrain:
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“I think we are just slow. The tyre degradation may be a little bit, but eventually we just lack performance. We need to push more in order to extract the performance out of the car so then the degradation comes up. We need to look into it because for now we are really far from the winning race pace. I think it’s very difficult to separate deg and performance. I think eventually we are just too slow in the race, and because we are too slow we are pushing a lot, and we are destroying the tyres, because we are slow. Red Bull seems to have so much more performance than we do in the race so they can manage in the first few laps, and then they start to push, and so that deg is much better.” – he added.
Charles Leclerc is aware that there was little positive for the Maranello team to take from the first weekend taking into consideration the lack of pace and the power unit technical failure that affected the SF-23 single-seater:
“The only positive we can take away from the weekend is that we did the right choice in qualifying by keeping those new softs,” he said. “We had a good start, but that is definitely not enough to make me happy after what happened. We were in second place for quite a few laps, which honestly was the best we could hope for. “Then we got passed by Checo which was just a matter of time, they are in a league of their own this weekend in terms of speed, so we couldn’t really challenge them. All of that doesn’t matter, as we need to finish the race. It was all about trying to manage the pace, manage the gap with the guys behind, which I was doing, not really pushing massively, but anyway there wasn’t time enough in the car to be able to challenge Red Bull. So third was the right position, but unfortunately, we didn’t finish the race.” – the Ferrari man concluded.
