Ferrari

Ferrari's Achilles heel REVEALED amid Red Bull 'copy' claims

Matthew Hobkinson Wednesday 14 June 2023 13:57

Senior Ferrari engineer Jock Clear has revealed that the SF-23 "is a very peaky car", something he labelled as the team's Achilles heel, after claiming that "just copying Red Bull" will not work.

The Spanish Grand Prix saw Ferrari introduce a significant upgrade package at Barcelona, with the changes producing mixed results.

Carlos Sainz, who qualified in second, would finish fifth after dropping down three places after lights out.

Charles Leclerc on the other hand endured much more of a nightmare weekend.

For Leclerc, the damage was done in Barcelona on the Saturday when he failed to make it out of Q1. The 25-year-old went on to cross the line in 11th just outside of the points, but even the gain of eight places would not help improve his mood.

Ferrari will be hoping that despite the poor performance in Spain, the changes made for the race can be the first step towards a more general improvement in performance for the rest of the season.

And Clear believes that there is one issue far more pressing than others for the team to sort.

“Absolutely,” Clear told The Race when asked if the changes have made the car less peaky. “That’s been our Achilles’ heel, it is a very peaky car.

“It’s a bit more fulsome [a change] than in the past where we’ve just looked to make the car a bit more benign.

“This is an upgrade that’s brought performance in terms of just grunt, it’s brought some more aero to the back end of the car. But in doing so, it’s also made the car a little bit less sensitive to wind, to yaw changes, to attitude changes.

'We cannot just copy Red Bull'

Sergio Perez's RB19 is hoisted into the air after crashing during qualifying at Monaco

“We all have to work around what we’ve structurally got and that is the challenge to ‘why doesn’t everybody just copy the Red Bull?’

“Now that we’ve seen every aspect of the Red Bull from Monaco [after Sergio Perez was hoisted into the air with a crane] we can all copy it.

"But there are certain structural limitations on where our chassis is, where our car is and that’s the challenge for all of us. That’s why just copying the Red Bull doesn’t work and we have to find our own solution.

“This upgrade is a testament to our aero guys to get this car to work around the chassis we have and the DNA of this car. And this is just the first step towards that. This has not made half-a-second, seven-tenths-of-a-second difference, this is two, three tenths at best.

“That is proof that the car has made a bit of a step forward. And it’s incremental, they’re all incremental [steps].”