Ferrari on a knife edge: the 'unknown' issues plaguing its 2023 F1 car

“I’m very disappointed with myself,” Leclerc admitted, “the same mistake in the same corner… But I also know that qualifying is my strong point and I’m taking more risk. In Q3 that pays off nine times out of 10 but this weekend I’ve put it in the wall.

“I put myself in a difficult situation because I wanted a very aggressive set-up for qualifying, knowing that was what I needed to get the most out of the car, but I probably went a step too far.”

It was gusty in Miami and Ferrari acknowledges that its car is sensitive to tailwinds. This though, looked more like a simple case of Leclerc being too ambitious. The Ferrari is edgy on the limit. Leclerc’s freakish ability can often cope with it, but it’s not a characteristic that Carlos Sainz likes, which probably has something to do with his average 2023 qualifying deficit of 0.34sec to Leclerc before last weekend.

Last year’s Ferrari looked a much more benign drive than the 2023 car, at least up until TD (Technical Directive) 39, which was introduced at Spa last year, restricting the level of porpoising, and tightening rules that regulate the flexibility of the underfloor plank. After that, the car never looked quite the same.

The rear ride height has been increased this year of course, and it was interesting to hear Verstappen’s take while answering a question about the added difficulty of overtaking this year, after Baku.

“The cars are probably too heavy and too stiff,” he said, “so you can’t really run a kerb to try to find a different line. Everyone is driving more or less the same line nowadays because of how the cars work, and how stiff the suspension is. And with people finding more and more downforce, it becomes harder to follow as well.”

Given the capabilities of Red Bull’s RB19, Verstappen’s own overtaking task is simpler than anyone else’s aside from Sergio Perez, but the truth of his words played out when Leclerc, who started seventh after his misdemeanour, found it tough to make any headway in the opening medium tyre stint, stuck in a DRS train. And later, on the hard compound Pirelli, the Ferrari simply didn’t work.

McLaren’s Zak Brown made a good point earlier in the weekend when, explaining McLaren’s poor showing, he said that if the car is a bit off at a given circuit, you’re in trouble, because whereas F1 used to have a front of field, mid-field and back-field, there’s now no back-field. Proving it, the entire grid, from Verstappen through to Logan Sargeant was covered by just 1.2sec in Q1 over a near 90sec lap!

The Miami race was actually a good barometer of field spread with no safety car interruptions and a pair or Red Bulls genuinely racing each other on different strategies. Against that backdrop, the stark reality for Ferrari is that Leclerc started two places ahead of Verstappen and finished 53 seconds behind him after 57 laps…

In view of what we’ve already seen from Ferrari this year, you worried when you heard Mercedes’ Andrew Shovlin say, on Friday, that last year’s Miami race was about “tip-toeing around trying not to overheat the tyres.”

The fact that there was precious little degradation on the hard tyre allowed Verstappen to make his hard/medium strategy work, but you had to control the temperatures and keep the car ‘in the window.’

Coming into the weekend, Fernando Alonso had speculated that the higher ambient in Miami may well allow him to beat the Ferraris, having finished just behind Leclerc in Baku. He was right, and Carlos Sainz, who had qualified third, half a second adrift of Perez’s pole, was left scratching his head at his distant fifth place, behind the two Red Bulls, Alonso’s Aston and Russell’s Mercedes, after a decent opening stint on the mediums.

“We’re in a learning process,” he grimaced. “Hopefully it will help us understand why, when we put the hard tyre on, we finish almost 20sec behind a car that we were quicker than on the mediums (Alonso’s Aston). The car is inconsistent and peaky. On a knife edge. Push hard over a lap and you degrade, go for an undercut and the race is too long. There’s lots of unknowns going on.”

Leclerc’s post-race body language spoke volumes too. Ferrari had flown out a new floor and diffuser post-Baku, and yet were nowhere. Charles confirmed his team mate’s findings regarding the handling traits, something he’d amply demonstrated with his two crashes before the race had even begun.

“It’s a very narrow window to get anything out of the car,” he said. “It goes from huge understeer to huge oversteer, with lots of bottoming and no consistency. We need to find something.”

With the Italian media getting restless once again and Imola next on the schedule, progress cannot come soon enough. Ferrari will have an upgrade package in two weeks’ time, but was noticeably keeping a lid on expectations. Maranello is struggling right now.