Marc Gene says Ferrari have the pace but a “very high mountain to climb”

Ferrari’s Marc Gene believes there is no reason why the team cannot pull back their deficit in both championships.

Ferrari brand ambassador and former long-term test driver Gene says optimism remains high within the Scuderia that the team can bounce back from their run of bad results after a double retirement for Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc in Azerbaijan.

Sainz retired from fourth place on lap nine with a hydraulic issue on his F1-75, while Leclerc retired from the lead on lap 20 – his second such retirement in three races.

As a result, Leclerc has slipped to 34 points behind Max Verstappen in the Drivers’ Championship, with Ferrari now 80 points behind Red Bull in the Constructors’.

Gene revealed there is plenty of pain going on at Ferrari in the wake of another disappointment.

“Every time we’ve had a DNF with Charles, he’s been leading the race,” he said on the F1 Nation podcast.

“That is even more painful today [as] we did the right strategy call. But then you don’t see it in the result.

“So whenever we make a wrong strategy call, we are also leading. Every time we make a mistake, reliability or strategy, we lose 25 points and when we don’t make that mistake, [it’s] not always we win. So [it’s] very painful.”

The Spaniard believes Leclerc could have won the race had his engine held up, despite having made a questionably early stop for hard tyres during the Virtual Safety Car period for Sainz’s stoppage.

“Of course there are positives,” said Gene. “The main one is that was a very high-speed track where you would have thought maybe Red Bull were stronger, and I think Charles would have won the race.

“The hard tyres, they made it to the end with [Daniel] Ricciardo and [Pierre] Gasly – they did many laps. So we have the pace, that’s the main thing. You want to have the pace and then, from that, you have the reliability.

“But we were more aggressive than Red Bull. I’m sure it was the right strategy call, so that shows the team is not so influenced about such a difficult week we had after Monaco.

“But if you think about the championship, and you look now at the classification, it’s a very high mountain to climb. You can do it with a car as fast as ours. But today is something worrying because [it was] not only [us] – two other cars had other issues.”

Given Red Bull and Verstappen turned around a large deficit after their early-season retirements in Bahrain and Australia, Gene believes there is…