The only winter testing session of 2023 has now come to an end. In Bahrain, Red Bull has impressed and the RB19 seems to be a car that already have at least half a championship season behind it given that it proved to be more than ready at the Sakhir circuit, at least in terms of tire degradation, a key feature of the demanding Bahrain track that doesn’t seem to affect Adrian Newey’s new Formula 1 challenger. There are question marks regarding the race pace on the Ferrari SF-23 car, but the impression is that, as in 2022, the Maranello team has not yet shown its true potential. Let’s take a look at how the Italian media reviewed Ferrari’s performance in the Bahrain test.
Red Bull on top, Ferrari partially satisfied
This is the title of today’s edition of the Italian daily newspaper La Repubblica which focused in the opening of its article on the RB19, the clearly best car both in terms of race pace and on the fastest lap: “Red Bull is dressed for celebration, the efforts are over. Assuming that they ever really started for Adrian Newey’s ingenious car: the English designer invented another jewel that hardly needed any corrections as soon as it hit the runway. Fast on a flying lap and also in race pace. Balanced. A car that knows how to manage the tyres like no other.”
Ferrari, however, is first on the list under the heading ‘challengers’ in the light of a Mercedes which was clearly in difficulty and regardless of the surprising Aston Martin: “The very reliable Red Bull (for Max there was only a small oil leak problem) resembles ease and strength similar to the Sebastian Vettel cycle. It’s up to others to defuse it. And Ferrari is certainly a candidate among these. The Maranello team is there on a flying lap, the race pace is still not as good as ‘the blues’, tire wear could still be a concern. The tests do not reveal all the potential and values of the field. Each team carries out its work, tries different solutions, studies itself. No team reveals everything. With how much fuel on board the tests are carried out, with what engine mode. No one, so far, has really pushed. Perhaps except for the Alfa Romeo Sauber (the engine is made in Maranello), so much so that Zhou took center stage with the best time on the second day while Bottas broke the engine: the parts were replaced and sent to the factory for analysis. Reliability alarm?” – La Repubblica wrote.
Postponed
The La Stampa newspaper is ‘waiting’ for next weekend to express its opinion on a Ferrari which has yet to reveal all its available potential given that the three-day test in Bahrain was dedicated to a study of a car which, compared to the F1-75, has more differences as compared to those between the Red Bull RB18 and the new RB19: “Ferrari carves out the role of pursuer. Twenty-four hours of testing don’t change the balance inherited from last season. At the end of the session, Sergio Perez was the fastest: 1’30″305, a couple of tenths below the pole position obtained by Charles Leclerc one year ago – continued the newspaper published in Turin – but nothing is taken for granted. Formula 1 single-seaters are increasingly sensitive: the temperature of the air, that of the asphalt, the type of tire compound can shift the result by more than a second. See you next Saturday, then. After the three days of testing, Formula 1 remains in Bahrain for the first race of the season. Temperatures could suddenly rise and rewrite the rankings, but Red Bull and Ferrari seem far enough away from the competition, to the point of competing for the championship only between them” – La Stampa pointed out.
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Ferrari get an 8 in report card
Il Resto del Carlino, an Italian newspaper based in Bologna, divides the page dedicated to Formula 1 into two parts: in the first there is the report card for each team made by engineer Luigi Mazzola, formerly a long-time member of Ferrari. The Scuderia from Maranello got an 8: “In these tests, Ferrari seems to have solved the top speed problems, but the problems of tire degradation still don’t seem fixed. There is still a lot of work to do and time is short”.
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