How Ferrari’s benign car shift has unlocked F1 performance gains

Amid the relentless monotony of
Max Verstappen’s domination of Formula 1 with Red Bull, there are few crumbs of comfort for the Dutchman’s rivals. Chasing Red Bull has become a measure of relative success, of progress towards the distant goal
of hopefully hauling in its advantage. In that, arguably the team with the biggest cause for patting itself on the back is Ferrari.

The Scuderia has come on a long way since this time a year ago, when it was in something close to crisis. Ferrari started 2023 with a capricious, uncompetitive car, after a 2022 season in which an early title challenge fell
apart in dramatic fashion.

Ferrari looked to have started F1’s new ground-effect era on the front foot when it emerged in 2022 with the fastest car, and Charles Leclerc took two wins in the first three races, and a healthy championship lead. But mix together reliability failures, operational errors, an inability to keep up with Red Bull in the development race, and a couple of driver errors, and the season unravelled.

This followed a tricky three years that started with a controversy over the legality of Ferrari’s engine in 2019, and then a dramatic fall
from competitiveness once governing body
the FIA intervened. Unsurprisingly, by the end of 2022, the bosses at Ferrari had had enough and chairman John Elkann relieved team principal Mattia Binotto
of his position.

Binotto’s replacement, Frederic Vasseur, joined in early January 2023, and knew even before last year’s car had turned a wheel that he had a job on his hands. Within a few laps of pre-season testing with a car which was the result of decisions made by a team under Binotto, Vasseur realised it was even bigger than he thought.

It is a measure of the turnaround Vasseur
has orchestrated, then, that Ferrari is in much better shape after the first tranche of races of
the 2024 season.

Vasseur has had a clear impact since his arrival at Ferrari a year ago, setting the team on an upward trajectory

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

Who’s better, who’s (second) best

In the first quarter of the season, Ferrari established itself decisively as F1’s second-best team on average. Over the opening leg of the season in the Middle and Far East, Ferrari was only once not the best non-Red Bull. That was in China, which was a sprint weekend, which can often throw a curve ball, and one that was moreover affected by mixed weather.

On top of that, Carlos Sainz has won a race, and his performance in Australia in doing so was so strong that it led to questions as to whether he could have beaten Verstappen even if the world champion hadn’t had the brake problem that caused his retirement after four laps. It’s impossible to give a definitive answer to that.

All weekend in Melbourne, people had been saying how strong Ferrari looked on race pace, but Verstappen’s problem – caused by a mechanic failing to do up the bolts after a post-qualifying check – affected him from the off, so the only data point to compare Red Bull and Ferrari was Sergio Perez. The Mexican had a particularly weak race and finished in fifth place, nearly a minute behind Sainz. But Vasseur summed up the problems with drawing too many conclusions from that.

Australia was also representative of a calmer, steadier, more effective approach to race management

“Nobody knows and nobody will know,” he said. “If you compare with the pace of Checo,
you could imagine it would have been possible [to beat Verstappen] but sometimes the gap between Max and Checo is big.”

What can be said about Melbourne, though, was that it highlighted a specific set of circumstances in which Verstappen and Red Bull are weaker than normal and Ferrari stronger – a front-limited circuit, where the cars tend towards understeer and front grip is the defining factor, and tyre graining, where the rubber surface
tears and grip falls away.

These factors also combined in Las Vegas, Ferrari’s strongest race of last year, Singapore win aside. In Sin City Leclerc challenged the
Red Bulls unusually closely, even re-passing Perez for second place on the last lap, and may even have won had Ferrari pitted him under
the mid-race safety car.

But Australia was also representative of a calmer, steadier, more effective approach to race management. Leclerc qualified behind Lando Norris but Ferrari competently deployed an undercut strategy, which then required clever tyre usage from Leclerc, to secure a one-two.

Sainz's victory in Melbourne was complemented by Leclerc finishing second, demonstrating strong in-race management from Ferrari

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

Winds of change

It is far from a panacea, though. Ferrari’s average qualifying pace compared with Red Bull has actually fallen away compared with last year.

But on every other metric – race pace, consistency, tyre management, operations – it has made
clear steps forward. The consequence is a feeling of measured optimism about the direction in which it’s going. This step forward is the result of decisions made by Vasseur and the technical team after those difficult early races of 2023.

The peak performance of the 2023 Ferrari was relatively high over one lap, but its behaviour was so unpredictable that its drivers found they couldn’t reliably access it. The car had inconsistent airflow, which meant that the drivers never knew what it was going to do when they turned-in to a corner, sapping their confidence, and resulting in a series of crashes.
It was also badly affected by wind.

So Ferrari then set about designing into this year’s car a much more benign set of characteristics, to create a machine whose maximum the drivers could access much more often. Coincidentally or not, this is the approach Red Bull’s design chief Adrian Newey has tried
to follow through his career.

Vasseur says: “I’m not focused on Red Bull. I’m focused on the performance of our car. Perhaps on the one-lap pace it’s not true, but where we made a huge step forward is more on the consistency between the tyre compounds or between one stint and the other.

“The car is much easier to drive, much easier to read for the drivers. It’s probably the biggest step we did compared with last year, to have something we cannot easily manage, but at least to have a good read of the car quite early into the weekend.”

Having a more benign car also has knock-on effects in races. Fighting it less means drivers can be smoother and look after the tyres more effectively, making it much easier to maximise performance. The Pirelli tyres in F1 are so sensitive that any abnormal slide creates a
peak of temperature, and each one of those
saps performance and life.

The SF-24 is more predictable than its predecessors, allowing the drivers to keep their tyres alive for longer and open up more strategic flexibility

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

“What is true is that last year, the car was
very difficult to drive and then into the race you were doing mistakes, damaging the tyres and then it’s a kind of negative spiral,” Vasseur says. “This year, it’s much easier to read for the
drivers to know where is the limit, to stay just a bit below – and when you have to do tyre management, it’s much easier.

“They are much more under control than
they were last year, when they were a bit in survival mode and in this you’re killing the
tyres quite quickly.”

A virtuous circle

In F1, this snowballs into wider benefits, as Carlos Sainz explains.

“We just simply improved the car,” he says. “Having a car that allows you to go a bit
longer [before a pitstop], allows you to be a
bit closer in dirty air and play around a bit
with the strategy, just allows you to shine a
little bit more, you know?

"If you see a jump this year on strategy, it’s purely down to the car. A car that allows you to have flexibility on strategy is something that
last year we couldn’t have"
Carlos Sainz

“And that’s why it’s important in the career of a driver to also be in a [good] car, because last year in the races we looked like we were always going backwards, always defending. We were terrible with tyre management and that was difficult to do good races. This year, it’s a completely different picture.”

For Sainz, this improvement in the car’s performance also has consequences for the team’s operational competence.

“We’ve made progress on strategy over the last three years, progressively,” he says, “but if you see a jump this year on strategy, it’s purely down to the car. Just having a car that allows you to have flexibility on strategy is something that
last year we couldn’t have.

“So, we were boxed in to stop at certain laps. We couldn’t extend. We had so much deg that it looked always like people could extend and then come back on us on a harder tyre. Last year, we were just zero flexible – so it looked like we were not getting the strategy right a lot of times.

Sainz believes Ferrari was made to look worse on strategy than it was by the limitations of its car

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

“But when you have a car that is better on tyres, two drivers that can push on the car more often and you have that extra flexibility, your strategy also looks better. And with this, I’m not underestimating the progress we’ve done. It’s just I really think this helps a lot.”

Progress there has definitely been, though,
and perhaps Sainz underplays it a little, even
if unintentionally. Think back two years, to the
first half of 2022.

Then, Ferrari had at least as fast a car as Red Bull, but repeated strategy errors cost Leclerc victories in Monaco, Silverstone and arguably Hungary. These contributed strongly to the team’s title campaign falling apart even before Red Bull kicked on in the second half of the season. It’s clear the work Vasseur has been doing recalibrating the team’s approach is paying off.

“When you have the pace it’s always much easier to manage these situations,” he says.
“I will say also this is coming with the confidence that it’s much more calm on the pitwall, and
it’s the best way to make good decisions. Everything is going together on the same direction and it’s smooth.”

Japan was a good measure of Ferrari’s progress. On a track with a good spread of corner types, and which consequently exposes a car’s weaknesses, last September the fastest Ferrari qualified 0.665s slower than Verstappen and finished fourth, behind both McLarens and 44s off the winner. Fast forward seven months to this year’s Suzuka race, and those numbers were 0.485s in qualifying and 21s in the race – and Ferrari was ahead of McLaren.

Dig a little deeper and it’s even more impressive than the basic stats. At Suzuka this year, both Ferraris beat both McLarens – one of which had qualified ahead of Sainz and both ahead of Leclerc – using two different strategies.

And Leclerc did so on a one-stop that was not only not the optimum strategy for overall race time, but which also featured a 25-lap first stint on mediums that was the longest any driver managed on those tyres. Something that in last year’s car would have been inconceivable.

Although its performance at Suzuka went under the radar, it underlined Ferrari's strong year-on-year progress

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

The car needs to star

One thing is still missing, though – a car that
can compete regularly at the very front. Ferrari isn’t even close to a position to challenge Red Bull on a regular basis. Vasseur says: “We made a huge step on the high speed compared with last year – Suzuka is a good example – and on the tyre management. But now we have other weaknesses.

“It’s always a compromise. You improve somewhere and you lose somewhere else. We’ve made a decent step forward. For sure they’re still a little bit ahead. The target is to be able to put them under pressure and with pressure you make more mistakes.”

To that end, Ferrari has a pretty significant upgrade coming this weekend. Sainz says: “They are definitely going to have an advantage in the first third of the season until we bring one or two upgrades that make us fight them more consistently. But by that time, maybe it’s a bit too late with the advantage they might have in the championship.”

Ferrari’s track record of upgrades before that is chequered at best – prior to last year, its failure to keep pace with the development rates of its rivals was a consistent theme

Leclerc, too, has high hopes of the upgrade – but they are tempered by an awareness of both the margin Ferrari has to make up to be a regular contender at the front, and the fact that upgrades cannot always be taken for granted.

Ferrari might well have hit its targets in changing the characteristics of the car from
last year to this. And it might also have effectively changed course in 2023 and introduced upgrades that likewise did what was expected to produce a more benign car, with which Leclerc finished last year strongly.

But Ferrari’s track record of upgrades before that is chequered at best – prior to last year, its failure to keep pace with the development rates of its rivals was a consistent theme, and a contributory factor to the failed title campaigns of Fernando Alonso in 2012 and Sebastian Vettel in 2017 and 2018.

Leclerc says: “What is going to be the game-changer is the upgrade. We will have to focus on that and as soon as we have them, that will give the direction for the rest of the season. So we’ll have to get it right.”

Can the latest Ferrari upgrades spring the Scuderia to the front as F1 returns to Europe?

Photo by: Davide Cavazza

Sainz and portents

As team-mates, Leclerc and Sainz have always had a relationship on two levels. Generally, they get on well and enjoy each other’s company. But at the same time there is an undeniable competitive tension, and sometimes it comes out.

Take China, where Leclerc was unhappy about Sainz’s robust defence in the sprint race, and Sainz was equally unimpressed with Leclerc’s at the first corner of the GP the following day, which almost seemed a direct reaction, and which cost each of them two places on the opening lap.

Quite often, the way these play out seem rooted in what is, in reality, an unequal relationship. Closely matched, Leclerc is demonstrably the quicker of the two on balance, and he is the one who has always been viewed by the team as the future.

Sainz, although knowing he was always provided with equal equipment, knows both these facts. And they hit home hard over the winter when, in quick succession, not only was a new long-term contract for Leclerc confirmed, as expected, but Ferrari rocked F1 – and Sainz – by signing Lewis Hamilton from 2025, leaving Sainz without a drive.

It was ironic, then, that Sainz started the season so strongly, with a win in Australia and a podium in Japan, in both of which races he was Ferrari’s strongest performer. Victory in Australia was especially impressive, coming just two weeks after abdominal surgery for appendicitis. It has, self-evidently, been a demanding time for Sainz.

“The year started with the news of the non-renewal,” he says. “Then you get yourself fit and ready for the start of the season, pushing flat out. And then you get to Bahrain. You do a good podium. You say, ‘OK, now the season is starting well and I can keep the momentum going.’

“And suddenly, boom, missing a race in Jeddah and the operation. Long days in bed, not knowing if I was going to be back in time. Obviously, a lot of unknowns. Am I going to be back fit? Am I going to be back feeling still good with the car? Then suddenly you come back and win. So, yes, life is a roller coaster sometimes.”

Sainz fought back from the low of missing Jeddah to win superbly in Melbourne

Photo by: Sam Bagnall / Motorsport Images

Where will Sainz end up next year? One option has closed following Alonso’s new deal at Aston Martin. That realistically leaves him with three possibilities – Red Bull, Mercedes and Sauber, which is becoming Audi in 2026.

But perhaps they are not all as realistic as some think. At Red Bull, there is at least one seat available – Perez’s contract runs out this year – and in extremis possibly two.

Yet this is a complicated scenario. For one thing, Red Bull was never that sold on Sainz when it had him in its junior team. It took a while to promote him to F1 and favoured Verstappen when they were team-mates.

Toto Wolff clearly sees Antonelli as the long-term future at Mercedes. Does Sainz want to be a stopgap?

On top of that there is a lot going on behind the scenes there, following the allegations of sexual harassment and controlling behaviour made by a female employee against team principal Christian Horner, Adrian Newey’s desire to leave, and a power struggle that could even affect Verstappen’s future.

Mercedes is hoping to benefit from that and tempt Verstappen away from Red Bull – it knows he and his father Jos Verstappen have been unsettled by the Horner situation. If it doesn’t succeed, the next favoured option is to promote 17-year-old protégé Andrea Kimi Antonelli.

The Italian might not be ready – he’s only in his first year of Formula 2, having skipped F3 – but Toto Wolff clearly sees him as the long-term future there. Does Sainz want to be a stopgap?

The most likely option
for Sainz might be the one that is least competitive, at least initially. He is the number-one target for Audi – led by Andreas Seidl, his former McLaren team boss. It will offer him a lucrative, multi-year deal and his future would be secured at a place where he was truly wanted and respected.

Can Seidl lure his former McLaren driver to join him at Sauber for its Audi era?

Photo by: Sauber