HISTORICAL TYRE MANAGEMENT WEAKNESS MUST FINALLY BE CURED

Binotto said that Leclerc’s recent defeat at Suzuka came down to“pushing too much on the very first laps – we simply destroyed the front tyres, in a way that it was not possible to recover”. He ate through his intermediates just like in Singapore, where Leclerc’s charge after the second safety car restart was thrilling – if very‘do or die’.

Once Perez had got his slicks up to temperature at Marina Bay, he drove away. This continued the pattern of Ferrari’s race pace in dry conditions falling away from Red Bull’s, a phenomenon that had really begun in Hungary at the end of July.

There, Ferrari was exposed in the cooler conditions on Saturday and Sunday, which meant it struggled to warm up its tyres in qualifying, and then had the same issue on the hard-compound Pirelli in the race. That cost Leclerc badly to the charging Verstappen on what really should have been firm Ferrari hunting ground, given the track’s high-downforce nature.

Ferrari has also struggled with front-tyre graining limitations at certain tracks. But since beating Verstappen comfortably on tyre management in Austria, which has turned out to be an outlier along the same lines as Melbourne, Ferrari’s rear-tyre overheating has also been its undoing.

In short, even if Leclerc can beat Verstappen to pole – ideally avoiding late Q3 errors such as at Zandvoort and Suzuka to edge the Dutchman – Red Bull’s stronger longrun pace and tyre-degradation levels make the races little contest. Verstappen is the master of tyre management, but Ferrari also has a historical weakness (think the

2021 French GP) that it will need to address for 2023.