Ferrari is “very, very far away” from challenging Red Bull with both drivers agreeing the SF-23 is “incredibly difficult” to drive.
Miami was a tough weekend for Charles Leclerc, who crashed twice in practice and qualifying before spending much of his race stuck behind the Haas of Kevin Magnussen.
Eventually, the Monegasque would finish seventh but later revealed the challenges he and teammate Carlos Sainz are dealing with in the cockpit.
“It was really difficult,” he told Formula1.com. “I was just speaking about it with Carlos and we basically agreed that we have a car that is so incredibly difficult to be on the limits.
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“The window of our car is so narrow and whenever you get a little bit out, it has huge consequences on the balance and it’s from one corner to the other, and even in one corner, sometimes you can have huge understeer, which goes to huge oversteer, and this is obviously not ideal to have confidence in the car.
“On my side, I don’t know what was going but with the high speed I had, the car was moving a lot, not from the rear but just the overall platform the car was bottoming like crazy.
“So we will check the car and everything but [it] didn’t feel great. I was saying with Carlos it was just a very inconsistent car.”
Miami also followed the now-established trend of Ferrari being the only real competition for Red Bull in qualifying but then dropping down the pecking order on race day.
“We are very far away, like very, very far away,” Leclerc said on matching Red Bull.
“And for me, I really struggled to find any explanations for why we are so far in the race and so close in qualifying. It is really something we need to work on.
“Mercedes are quick, Aston Martin are really quick in the race, the Alpine didn’t look too bad in the race. I cannot add anything more than we have a lot of work to do and we need to find something.”
Ferrari’s main weakness over a race distance is tyre wear, with Sainz explaining just how limited the team is.
“You have very little flexibility because you push one lap to go for an undercut, you degrade the tyres and then the race is too long,” said the Spaniard.
“It just means we cannot play around too much with our competitors in terms of strategy and on level of pushing to overtake them, undercut them, and this leaves us with a lot of unknowns going into a race and a lot of things to learn, because it’s clearly not where we want to be and we will make sure we take steps in the right direction.
“We will keep trying things, that’s everything I can say.”
