Why Ferrari isn't changing its 2023 F1 car concept to copy Red Bull

Ferrari insists it’s not a Formula 1 team in crisis. This is despite its haul from the opening three rounds of the 2023 season standing at 26 points, with a best result of fourth and no podium finishes.   

What cannot be denied is that this represents the team’s worst start to a season in terms of points scored after three rounds since 2009. 

That could change if Ferrari’s request for a right of review into Carlos Sainz’s late Australian Grand Prix penalty is deemed admissible and he gets back the 12 points lost in the five-second addition handed down for punting Fernando Alonso around at the controversial restart. But it seems highly unlikely.   

Speaking five days after the Melbourne race – his scheduled post-race media briefing cancelled due to the elongated proceedings imperilling his travel plans – team principal Fred Vasseur insisted Ferrari is “sticking to the plan”.  Vasseur went on to add that his team will “continue in this direction” with its SF-23 challenger, that “we won't come with something completely different” through in-season upgrades.   

“It's not a B-car if that is what you want to say,” Vasseur explained – flat-out emphasising Ferrari will not be taking the same approach as Mercedes and changing its car concept in 2023 in a bid to get back on terms with Red Bull.  

But this stands at odds with what Sainz had been saying just a week earlier.  

“We realise now that Red Bull has a clear advantage everywhere and that we need to start looking to our right and to our left,” the Spaniard replied in Melbourne when Autosport asked if there were any tracks where the SF-23 might come good against the crushingly commanding RB19. 

The 2023 Red Bull is stronger than Ferrari in all areas, believes Carlos Sainz

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

Sainz, having gone to considerable lengths in pointing out where the Red Bull leads the field right now – “[It’s] superior in quali, in race, in straightline speed, superior in medium/low-speed corners, superior with tyre management, superior over the kerbs and bumps” – was also conceding that car has greater scope to get even better.  

Essentially, Ferrari has no hope of matching its early 2022 title rival without abandoning what makes the SF-23, and before it the F1-75, as good as it is.   

Yet Vasseur’s other statements offer clues to his squad’s longer-term plan to get back on terms with Red Bull. This is something Sainz alluded to when he said in Melbourne: "I’m convinced this team can turn it around. Not in a short period of time, but in a medium period of time."

“We got to the first test and we immediately saw people haven’t suffered from the change of regulations. [That] they are much quicker than last year and this left us thinking whether we clearly have got something that we didn’t get right” Carlos Sainz

"To do a new project during the season, to start from scratch, to do a new car with the cost cap, but also considering the restriction of the wind tunnel time – I don't want to say that it's impossible, but it's very difficult,” Vasseur explained.  "Also, on our side, we have the feeling, and I hope that we are right, that we are going in the right direction, that we have still tons of room for improvement on the car."

It’s possible for Ferrari to have plenty of scope for gains on its current package and that, even if they’re implemented completely successfully, it will still come up short against the RB19. This, it seems, is Sainz’s point.  

Vasseur says F1’s current cost cap restrictions mean the much-vaunted successful B-spec switches of past eras are no longer viable. But really, there is some scope for change, as Aston Martin showed in 2022.

Major car changes in the cost-cap era are unlikely, but Ferrari can still take the step forward it needs under the current rules

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

It adopted its ‘green Red Bull’ concept for last year’s Spanish GP and went from having one of the worst cars on the grid to leading the midfield at times by the campaign’s conclusion. 

But Aston needed a full off-season to refine the downwash approach Red Bull had pioneered and leap to being its nearest rival on 2023 race results so far. Mercedes’ insistence it had ‘baked-in’ performance losses with the W13 – centred on its rock-hard ride and remaining bouncing problems come the end of 2022 – reinforce this.  

Mercedes needed the off-season to alter its suspension and finally shake off porpoising’s lingering motion sickness. Only when it did, Mercedes realised its targets had been set too low in comparison to Red Bull and that by continuing with the W14’s W13-evolution approach it would never catch up. 

Ferrari, says Sainz, had a similar realisation. 

“We thought this car was… the targets were gonna be OK and we were gonna be fast,” he explained. “We got to the first test and we immediately saw people haven’t suffered from the change of regulations. [That] they are much quicker than last year and this left us thinking whether we clearly have got something that we didn’t get right.” 

And so, the central conclusion from Vasseur’s message on Ferrari’s long-term plan is that it is now waiting for the 2023 off-season to relaunch its modern ground effect era. That a ‘red Red Bull’ might be lining up for the start of the 2024 campaign.  

All of this could be a diversionary tactic from Vasseur – that the updates Ferrari is now seemingly rushing forward to introduce at Miami, Imola and Barcelona will fundamentally change the SF-23 under a guise of relaxed expectations. But his cost cap point is overriding, combined with the 2022 Aston and Mercedes lessons.  

Vasseur suggests Ferrari's big overhaul will come in 2024 - though is this just a diversion for its rivals?

Photo by: Ferrari

But waiting until 2024 for a major car concept reset comes with risks for Ferrari. Firstly, it would miss the data provided by extensive on-track running of altered floor and sidepod parts – valuable elements of Aston’s stunning year-on-year rise. And it could also risk alienating one of Ferrari’s consistently brilliant aspects of recent years: Charles Leclerc. 

The Monegasque driver may be in the midst of his worst F1 season start since his rookie year with Sauber in 2018, but he has also provided Ferrari’s only 2023 high points.

Namely, running Red Bull close for pole in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia before reliability ruined his podium shots in both events. His Melbourne weekend was a shocker, but his race retirement clashing with Aston’s Lance Stroll had more than a whiff of his 2020 mistakes in trying to overcome an unexpected car performance deficit. 

Red Bull’s concept has been refined and honed to devastatingly good effect for 2023, while Ferrari’s attempts to make up for its straightline speed deficits in the SF-23’s evolutions have proved to be too low in ambition and also compromised its drivers’ chances

Leclerc’s Ferrari contract is up at the end of 2024. And, if the team is waiting until the start of that season to prove it can catch back up to a Red Bull squad eyeing its own big gains, there’s surely a chance he could be persuaded to race elsewhere by interested suitors. But waiting does at least buy Ferrari some time to prove to its star driver that it’s capable of finally, truly coming back to being F1’s best.  

Indeed, Sainz reckons Ferrari’s early 2022 false dawn of F1 title potential for the first time since 2007-08 was a key reason why it stuck to the F1-75/SF-23 inwash concept and how that works with suspension and floor components for so long. 

“The extremely good performance at the start of last season made us, I think, keep pushing with this concept, with this project of car,” he explained in Australia.   

Ferrari's continued use of the inwash concept is a result of its 2022 false dawn, reckons Sainz

Photo by: Jake Grant / Motorsport Images

That event in 2022 was the high point of Ferrari’s F1 revival – where it made good on its promise to get back to winning ways for the first time since 2019, which is a point not praised as much as it should be.   

This is because of what happened next: that after going on a diet ahead of F1’s return to Europe last year, the RB18’s initial concept was proved to be the class of the new era. And the best part of Ferrari’s package – its engine – proved to be too fragile to run at its most potent.  

Red Bull’s concept has been refined and honed to devastatingly good effect for 2023, while Ferrari’s attempts to make up for its straightline speed deficits in the SF-23’s evolutions have proved to be too low in ambition and also compromised its drivers’ chances. They have to overcome what Vasseur and Sainz call its “peaky” race-trim traits.  

These prevent Leclerc and Sainz pushing on as they would like, while Ferrari’s attempts to improve its engine seemingly haven’t resulted in the critical reliability gains so far. 

Ferrari’s current 2023 position isn’t as bad it looks. Even building on the early reliability woe, its Australian potential was ruined – for Leclerc – as it messed up Q3 anticipating rain that never came. And its drivers then made critical points-costing errors in that race. Sainz is hoping the SF-23’s smaller qualifying deficit to Red Bull raises hopes of upcoming Monaco success. 

Vasseur insists Ferrari’s decision to make “adjustments in terms of balance and behaviour”, in favour of improved race pace, paid off in Melbourne.  He acknowledges that the SF-23’s “peaky” problems can be overcome in qualifying, where the soft tyres only need to last a lap, and the against-the-clock session is Leclerc’s key strength. But, famously, qualifying awards no points and so improving in race trim is vital for Ferrari’s hopes of ever beating Red Bull again.  

Ferrari has closed the gap to Red Bull in qualifying trim

Photo by: Lionel Ng / Motorsport Images

“The pace for me was good, not mega, but it was good,” Vasseur said of Sainz’s Melbourne run after recovering to fourth and a few seconds back from the Lewis Hamilton/Alonso battle. Indeed, Sainz’s lap time average for the main period of green-flag racing came in at 1m21.586s against Max Verstappen’s 1m21.359s – a 0.227s difference.  

But the Dutchman by then had no opposition and was managing his pace to the finish. And early Melbourne leader George Russell has suggested Red Bull is “almost embarrassed to show their full potential, because the faster they seem globally, the more the sport is going to try to hold them back somehow” – per post-race comments the Briton made to BBC Radio 5 Live. 

 This starkly emphasises two things for Ferrari.  

That its task now is to overcome what some in the paddock estimate to be a 0.7s-1s Red Bull race pace advantage with a likely 2024 car concept change. And that if it’s pinning its hopes on doing that, Ferrari is in a holding pattern of frustration it just may never escape under the current design rules and their 2026 ending.

Red Bull, after all, won’t be standing still if Ferrari finally starts chasing down its pioneering path… 

Whatever Ferrari does next, Red Bull won't be standing still...

Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images