Why drivers are the least of Ferrari’s F1 worries

Charles Leclerc summed up Ferrari’s situation heading into the new world championship campaign in a couple of sentences in one answer
 at the launch of its new car this year.

“2022 was a good step forward compared with the two difficult years of 2020 and 2021,” Leclerc said, “but we finished second in both championships.

“I think we’ve done a great job on the new car trying to address the weaknesses of last year’s car. The goal is to win, clearly. It’s what motivates me and all the team. I’m really looking forward to getting back in the car and trying to win that championship.”

In one way, Leclerc’s remarks reflect his character, which has always been open 
and straightforward. In another, perhaps they are also indicative of a new start
 for Ferrari this year.

The same two drivers, yes, but there is a new team boss in Frederic Vasseur, and one who has employed a similar directness in the few short weeks he has been in position. Ferrari’s weaknesses last year were obvious, it was pointed out to Vasseur in his first meeting with the media. Reliability and car development were not good enough, and there were too many strategy errors. Vasseur met the question head-on, with a smile.

PLUS: How Vasseur has begun Ferrari’s mission to keep Leclerc on side

“Thank you for doing my analysis for me,” he said, before going on to explain that the engine department seemed to have done a good job and he hoped reliability was under control, and that development was complex under a cost cap when weighing progress one year against design for the next.

“I wasn’t there and don’t want to make any judgements on what has happened in the past,” he said. “But we will see during the season.”

Vasseur has already got to work enacting changes after problems in the Binotto era

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

As for strategy, he said: “You see only the visible part of the iceberg, and strategy isn’t just a matter of the guy at the top of the iceberg. Very often it’s matter of communication, organisation, the flow of communication on the pitwall, and we’re in the process of reviewing everything. It’s a bit short notice for me but we will have to do some improvement.”

The contrast with his predecessor Mattia Binotto’s consistent public denials last year
 that anything was wrong on strategy did
 not go unnoticed. The message – and, more importantly,
 the direction – was clear. And that message
 was underlined at the start of pre-season
 testing, a week before the opening race, when
 it emerged that head of strategy Inaki Rueda
 had been switched to a new factory-based sporting role, and replaced by one of his
 previous lieutenants, Ravin Jain.

“Fred arrived with very clear ideas and understands a team that’s very big,” Leclerc says. “Within a few days he understood what had to
 be done and he did it. It’s positive. His job is to put people in the right positions, and he’s excellent at it. Amazing.”

 Is Leclerc at Max’s level?

Of the many question marks hanging over Ferrari heading into 2023, the smallest one is over the drivers. In Leclerc, the Scuderia has a man of extravagant talent, who is increasingly regarded as perhaps the out-and-out fastest
 over one lap in the entire field.

"When I was saying at the end of the year we’ve looked at the bad races, I also looked at my bad races and what I could have done better in those weekends and learn from it" Charles Leclerc

Nine pole positions last year tell their own story and, while some have pointed out the disparity between the 18 poles he has scored in his career and his five victories, an analysis of why that has happened quickly makes it clear that the failings are overwhelmingly on the side of the team, not the driver.

Such was the case last year, too. Leclerc’s nine poles begat just three victories. But three further potential wins were lost to strategy errors (Monaco, Silverstone and Hungary) and two more to engine failures (Spain and Azerbaijan). Without those, the championship battle would have run a lot longer than it did, even if the result would not have changed.

Leclerc himself made two significant errors – at Imola, where a spin in the closing stages dropped him from chasing Sergio Perez for second to sixth, and in France, where he crashed out of the lead while trying to build a gap to Max Verstappen on an off-set strategy. He is nothing if not self-critical, and he recognises this is an area in which he still has room for improvement.

Leclerc is resolved to continue his personal quest for improvement - and the same applies to Ferrari

Photo by: Ferrari

“The goal as every year is to try and improve,” he says. “In the first years in F1, you always have one particular thing that you need to improve on as a driver. Now it’s been a few years I’m trying to put the pieces together.

“I know how to be quick. Obviously, there were some mistakes. I’ll try and do fewer and fewer mistakes year after year. But overall it’s just try and become a better driver, learn from the past experiences. When I was saying at the end of the year we’ve looked at the bad races, I also looked at my bad races and what I could have done better in those weekends and learn from it.

“There are different points of focus, it’s not just one area. It’s to become a better driver overall and, if as a team we do the best job we can, I’m sure we can be successful.”

While Leclerc never seeks to hide from his errors, though, it’s not entirely fair to say this is an area of weakness compared with Verstappen. The Red Bull driver also made two significant in-race errors; it’s just that his didn’t hurt him.

In Spain, Verstappen spun off in the early stages when chasing Leclerc, but came
back to win after Leclerc’s engine failure and Red Bull imposed team orders on Perez. In Hungary, Verstappen spun at the penultimate corner having just taken the lead, but managed to continue without losing more than a few seconds.

Towards the end of last year, Carlos Sainz said he believed his team-mate was “driving at a level that is very close to Max or any other driver. And for me he’s in a way done a perfect season, apart from the two or three typical mistakes everyone does in a year, or the luck [which] maybe he has been lacking the same as me.”

If Ferrari has no doubts Leclerc is capable of delivering a title, the confidence doesn’t necessarily work the other way around.

The constant knock-backs Leclerc received through last year as he tried to deliver Ferrari’s first drivers’ title since 2007 clearly wore him down, and his radio messages after the numerous strategy errors suggested he was beginning to question his team.

If Ferrari is unable to provide Leclerc with a winning car and address its 2022 strategy errors then his public confidence in the team may falter, as it did for Alonso

Photo by: Ferrari

There are parallels here with Fernando Alonso. He, too, was utterly dedicated to winning a title with Ferrari. But four years of falling just short, of Alonso performing heroics in cars that lacked the performance to properly challenge Red Bull, ultimately led to him losing faith in the ability of the team ever to get him there, and he negotiated an exit from his contract two years before it was up.

The five-year deal Ferrari signed with Leclerc after his starring debut season with the team in 2019 lasts until 2024. That might seem a long way away, but Leclerc will already be thinking of what to do when it comes around. And one of the tasks Ferrari faces this year is convincing its lead driver that it really can deliver him the title he craves. In Ferrari’s favour is that his obvious alternative destination – Mercedes – is facing questions of its own.

Sainz goes marching in

If Lewis Hamilton and George Russell is widely regarded as the strongest driver line-up, Leclerc and Sainz at Ferrari must be next in line. Sainz established himself as one of grand prix racing’s leading drivers with his two seasons alongside Lando Norris at McLaren. Since his move to Ferrari, that position has been consolidated – directly, by his results compared with Leclerc, and indirectly, by Norris’s destruction of Daniel Ricciardo.

Brought to Ferrari as support for Leclerc, Sainz has proved himself much more than a number two. He works hard, tends to improve as the season progresses as he becomes more familiar with the demands of the car, and has a tactical intelligence that over last season suggested the best strategist in the Ferrari team was the man driving the number 55 car.

"I know as soon as this year I find my groove, a good window of comfort in the car, I know I’m able to do very good things" Carlos Sainz

But Sainz doesn’t quite have Leclerc’s pace and raw natural ability, as evidenced by the qualifying comparison between the two. Leclerc was the quicker on average by 0.13s over the 2022 season and 0.123s in 2021. Last year, though, those statistics are influenced by the struggles Sainz had with the car’s tail-happy handling – the average deficit was 0.265s after Leclerc outqualified his team-mate eight times in a row at the start of the season. But from Silverstone onwards, the average margin was only 0.03s, reflective of Sainz’s improvement.

“Last year I felt very close to the limit of the car,” Sainz says, “and was performing at a very high level so I’m hopeful I can start where I left off and do a step in the right direction. I hope the car can adapt a bit more to my driving and I can adapt a bit better to it, and it will be a strong start to the season. I’ve been working hard over winter to arrive to this season prepared and convinced that I can do it and become an even better driver.

“Last year I had my bit of success. It’s true it wasn’t an easy season, but in a not-easy season 
I won a race, three poles, a lot of podiums with
a car that maybe I wasn’t at my best with. I know as soon as this year I find my groove, a good window of comfort in the car, I know I’m able to do very good things.”

Sainz did out-score Leclerc in the championship in their first season together, but that was more reflective of circumstances twisting in his favour than any performance advantage. But if he has yet to prove he can beat Leclerc on merit over a season, he remains determined to prove that’s the case, while being more than smart enough to try within the bounds of the way the team is run.

Now in his third year at Ferrari, Sainz is confident in his own abilities

Photo by: Ferrari

There is no number one or two at Ferrari, and Leclerc says: “I completely agree with this philosophy. It’s important for Carlos and me to be fully motivated, do the best job possible
in the first part of the season, to push each other to perform the best.

“Then, if at one point in the championship, a driver is clearly in the fight for winning that championship, then I’m sure the team will do everything possible for the driver that’s fighting for the championship, for him to be in the best possible conditions. This we’ll talk about at a later date of course. At the beginning of the season this is the right thing to do.”

Can the car do the job?

However good the driver line-up, though, it means nothing without a competitive car, and the biggest questions over the team hang over performance and race-management. Vasseur has set about resolving the weaknesses in the team, and the drivers are optimistic he will be successful.

“We need to give Fred time,” Leclerc says, “but already you start seeing different things and I respect a lot everything Fred has done in his past. I’m sure he’ll give us things to improve and change that are going to go in the right direction.”

But what about performance? The word from inside Ferrari is that it has a 0.2s lap-time gain compared with the second half of last season, attributed to the reliability fixes on the engine, which can now run in higher performance modes again. The engineers have worked on reducing drag, to counter the straight-line speed advantage of the Red Bull last year, but Leclerc has already raised questions as to whether this has affected cornering performance.

Evidence from the first two rounds shows that, for all Ferrari’s
 work over the winter, it is Red Bull which has the fastest car. But there is confidence at Maranello that Ferrari can make a fight of it. This is partly informed by the hope that Red Bull will be affected by its 10% reduction in permitted aerodynamic research, the punishment for breaching the budget cap in 2021, combined with its already limited allowance on F1’s new inverse sliding scale based on championship positions.

Leclerc says: “One thing for sure is that, especially after a year like last year, whether we are first in the first race, doesn’t mean it’s finished, and that goes both ways. If we’re winning the first race, it doesn’t mean it will be just the same until the end of the season, and vice versa. If we have a bad first race we shouldn’t give up and give in. Keep pushing because everything is possible.”

“When you’re at Ferrari coming from 2022,” Vasseur says, “you can’t have another objective than to win. I don’t want to say it will be easy because Red Bull and Mercedes will have the same target, and only one team and driver will win. But we need to have this kind of target. We need to have the mindset to do a better job tomorrow than today and to be always trying to improve the system.”

Ferrari has started 2023 on the back foot and needs Vasseur's new groove to take effect to fight back against Red Bull

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images