Charles Leclerc is hopeful Ferrari will show it has got on top of the problems which have dogged it in recent races when it introduces an upgrade for its SF-24 this weekend.
Ferrari is bringing the next step for its car in time for its home event at Monza. The team encountered problems with the new floor it introduced in its previous home round at Imola, and spent several rounds focused on solving them, but Leclerc believes they are making progress now.
“We’ve had three or four races, four races ago, where we were experimenting quite a lot to try and understand what were the fundamental issues of our car for the development, medium-term,” Leclerc explained. “We’ve got an upgrade coming very soon.
“Now I can say actually because Fred [Vasseur, team principal] said it, so it will be in Monza. And that, I hope, will help us and help us close the gap.”
Leclerc finished third for the second race in a row at Zandvoort last weekend, which gave him some encouragement about Ferrari’s competitiveness.
“Until the upgrades, I always said that the priority for us was just to do a damage limitation,” he said after Sunday’s race. “Today, we were targeting P6. Realistically, I think on paper, that’s what we were fighting for.
“However, after three, four laps, the pace was there. And we [finished] P3, which is a good surprise again. Good points. However, now I just hope that the upgrade helps us to do a step forward.”
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He admitted he was surprised by the extent of the team’s gains in the race after qualifying almost a second off pole-winner Lando Norris.
“I think the best question is also to understand why we were nine tenths off yesterday and suddenly pretty strong today,” said Leclerc. “The car is exactly the same.
“Yesterday, we’ve been struggling like crazy. Today, we were strong. And these are the kind of things that we’ve got to work on.
“I think as much as we analyse every bad surprise we have during a season, we also need to understand when we do something good. For now, I don’t think as a team we have the explanation. So it’s a great result. I’m really happy to be standing on the podium, I think it’s a really good surprise. However, we’ve got to understand in order to perform more often at our best.”
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