MARANELLO, Italy — The main road running into Maranello from the north has become a point of pilgrimage for Ferrari fans at this time of year. Roughly half a mile from the team’s famous factory gates the road rises up to cross a ring road and — although Maranello’s town planners never considered it — offers a perfect view of the first corner of the Fiorano test track.
On Tuesday morning word spread among Ferrari’s loyal following, known as the tifosi, that the team’s new Formula One car would make its track debut at Fiorano shortly after midday. Hundreds of fans arrived in person to celebrate the unofficial start of the 2023 season and as the surrounding industrial estate reverberated to the sound of the SF23’s V6 engine, the concrete overpass was packed with people.
Inside Fiorano’s gates, Ferrari invited a further 500 fans from its official supporters club to watch the launch from a temporary grandstand. The team’s sponsors were wined and dined in a trackside hospitality unit and a media centre was set up in one of the old stable buildings next to the former farm house of the company’s founder Enzo Ferrari.
Although car launches have no bearing on a team’s chances of success later in the year, the nature of the SF23’s required a certain level of confidence from Ferrari. New Formula One cars are notoriously temperamental and the choice to hit the track at a public event — with a further 200,000 fans watching via YouTube — risked the potential for an embarrassing start to the year.
“It’s relatively high risk to put a brand new F1 car on track in front of so many people and actually enjoy it without any single problem,” Ferrari driver Carlos Sainz said later in the day.
“Normally on an installation lap there are little issues here and there, but today things were running smoothly. I could actually push a little bit in the car in corners and feel a few things.”
Sainz lost out on a toss of a coin to decide which of the two Ferrari drivers would hit the track first, but benefitted from knowing the car had behaved itself with teammate Charles Leclerc behind the wheel before him.
“I asked Charles ‘Is everything OK? Everything feels OK? On the brakes the car feels normal, yeah?’ He said: ‘Yeah, everything feels normal’, and I went out and I pushed and I tried to feel something.”
Just six laps were completed between the two drivers in accordance with F1’s demonstration run…
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