Charles Leclerc says Ferrari’s lack of competitiveness in the British Grand Prix shows that it still needs to make big steps forward with its 2023 car.
Ferrari brought an upgrade in recent races that led to a much-improved showing in race pace in both Canada and Austria, re-igniting its chances of finishing second in the constructors’ championship. However, at Silverstone Leclerc ended up ninth and Carlos Sainz 10th after pitting early and losing out under the safety car, something Leclerc says is more damaging to the end result due to the overall lack of performance.
“Honestly, not having the pace puts us in a situation where it’s very tricky to manage whatever situation there is,” Leclerc said. “So then it looks like bad luck. The timing of the safety car was definitely not the best for us, and was beneficial for many other drivers. At the end, it’s life. We just didn’t have pace. It’s not like we degraded the tires more than others. It’s just that Mercedes and McLaren were stronger than us.
“I managed to keep George (Russell) behind for the first part of the race. Then I think we pitted for George not to pit and undercut us, but that was too early. And then we had the safety car, once I started pushing on the hard, and then we got overcut by most of the people.
“There’s still a long way to go. At the moment, we seem still very sensitive to the change of conditions. When I say change of conditions, I mean mostly the wind. When we have a change of wind, our car becomes extremely difficult, and on that, we have made steps forward, but there are still quite big steps to do.”
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Leclerc says the difference between Ferrari’s single-lap pace and race performance also remains a problem that needs solving, after seeing McLaren make big strides in recent weekends.
“This is very difficult to understand. But we knew that this track was going to be one of our worst tracks, just because of the high-speed corners. This is one of the weaknesses of the car. It was kind of a positive surprise to be so close (in qualifying) — not timing-wise, because I didn’t do a great lap in Q3, but we were very close to Red Bull on the timed lap.
“But then in the race, we have been struggling a lot, and mostly in high-speed corners. We know why we are struggling. We are pushing a lot on the development, especially for these high-speed corners, and hopefully it will be better at the next race (in Hungary) — the track characteristics should suit our car a little bit better.
“(McLaren) were already surprising last week in Austria. This weekend, they did an even bigger step forward, and they did a great job. We knew also they are strong in high-speed corners — we could see that in Austria. We’re expecting them to be strong here, but probably not as strong as what we’ve seen. Great job by them, and now we need to push to try and catch them, at least in high-speed corners.
“It was a surprise. It’s very difficult to expect this year’s race results, because it’s so inconsistent between teams. (McLaren) were very strong this weekend.”