Ferrari believe improvements in their car’s tyre degradation and straight-line speed will help them challenge Red Bull for victory in today’s Bahrain Grand Prix.
Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz Jnr will start today’s season-opening race from the second row of the grid. World champion Max Verstappen and Red Bull team mate Sergio Perez locked out the front row.
Ferrari appeared to be at a disadvantage to their rivals after pre-season testing. However Leclerc ran Verstappen closer than expected in qualifying and his coach Jock Clear said the team is satisfied with how their car has behaved over the opening weekend of the season so far.
“Before those five days of running we were comfortable with the development we made. We know there are some areas we need still to work on. Then we came here and I think the most encouraging thing is that the car is doing exactly what we wanted it to do. There’s no areas where we’re saying, ‘oh, this isn’t working, we need to go back to the wind tunnel and have a look’.
“Clearly Red Bull have done a very good job, Aston Martin has done a good job and Mercedes are always there. Maybe we didn’t expect Aston Martin to be where they are, but certainly Mercedes, Red Bull, we expected to be alongside us. And I think we’re comfortable with where we’re at. Though obviously you’d like to get to Bahrain and find you’ve got a half a second advantage.”
Ferrari’s decision not to send Leclerc out for a final run in Q3, in order to save a fresh set of soft tyres, raised speculation the team was concerned over how quickly its rubber would degrade in the race. However Clear said the team has addressed this weakness it experienced during 2022.
“We worked a lot last year on our tyre management and certainly at the end of the year I think we made some very good progress. We worked again on that over the winter and in the three days of testing last week. So hopefully, as I said before, we can we can manifest that today with actually challenging Red Bull over the race distance.
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“We’ve seen yesterday that they’ve probably got a little bit of a margin on us on a qualifying lap. But I really believe this afternoon when Charles gets a sniff of those Red Bulls, I think, he and Carlos can take the fight to them.”
Yesterday Sainz admitted he was concerned Red Bull would be even further ahead of them in the race….
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