Charles Leclerc says Ferrari’s lack of consistency this season is making it tough for its drivers to have any confidence during a race.
Ferrari brought a new floor to the Miami Grand Prix after a promising weekend in Azerbaijan in which Leclerc took pole for both the Grand Prix and the sprint and picked up his first podium of the season. However, he endured a tough race a week later in Miami. Leclerc crashed twice — including once in qualifying — and was limited to seventh place, with Carlos Sainz fifth after losing out to Mercedes’ George Russell in the latter stages.
“What we are lacking is consistency on the car,” Leclerc said. “It’s not even from corner to corner — in the same corner I can have a huge oversteery balance and then a huge understeery balance. Our car is so wind-affected…
“I think it’s been similar since the beginning of the season in every single races. We are going from one compound to the other, and we never know what’s going to happen on the new compound.
“It’s always an unknown, whether the car is going to react well, whether the tires are going to be in the right window. This (makes it) very difficult as a driver to gain the confidence and to adapt your driving. You go from one set to the other, and the car is completely in a different window.”
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The Monaco native says the wildly varying back-to back weekends in Baku and Miami are part of a trend that makes it hard to guess how competitive Ferrari will be at any given race.
“Again, I think this is also part of consistency. We sometimes feel like we’ve done a step forward, and then you arrive in some very particular conditions — it was warmer than other races (in Miami), and now we are completely out of the right window of the tires. So we need to work on that.
“The conditions are going to be very different (for the next race in Imola) with different weather. So we’ll have some new parts on the car which will hopefully go in the right direction. We are working on that consistency, and I hope we’ll see the first progress there.”
Looking at the wider competitive picture following a Miami GP that Ferrari was second and third in a year ago, Leclerc says his team has failed to make the required progress in race trim compared to its rivals.
“It was quite different from last year. But yeah, I think most of all, Red Bull has found something in the race. The Aston Martins, we know that they have a very different car to what they had last year, and Mercedes has done a small step forward, but also last year, they were stronger in the race than they were in qualifying. I think Mercedes is less of a surprise. We are just struggling massively still in the race.”