Ferrari’s Le Mans success cannot mask their ongoing F1 struggles
A week on from a hard-fought victory at the Le Mans 24 Hours, Ferrari will have taken heart from a reminder that they can compete with and beat the best. Yet at this weekend’s Canadian Grand Prix, in the discipline that matters most to the Scuderia, the best they can hope for it appears is coming to a better understanding of their car. While Red Bull march away with the Formula One championship, Ferrari are increasingly exasperated and baffled.
The win at Le Mans last weekend was a demonstration of a successful, quick car, driven and operationally managed with great skill in challenging and changeable conditions at the vingtquatre.
The import was not lost on anyone at Ferrari. The group’s chair, John Elkann, was at Le Mans, as was the F1 team principal, Fred Vasseur, and their lead driver, Charles Leclerc. All were overjoyed at the result, Ferrari’s first overall win at Le Mans since 1965.
Nor can the irony be missed in that the team re-entered the top class of endurance racing for the first time in 50 years partly because they needed to reallocate staff and resources away from F1 in order to meet the budget cap.
On the grid at Le Mans the mechanics were smiling, taking selfies with the huge crowd, their joie de vivre in contrast to the almost tangible air of heavy expectation and intense pressure that surrounds the F1 team now entering its 15th season without a title.
It equals the longest winless streak they have endured, a wearying weight to carry.
Having started last year so strongly but then falling away to Red Bull, this season they have failed to even hit the ground running. They are fourth in the constructors’ championship behind Red Bull, Mercedes and Aston Martin, and optimism has long been replaced by the cold realisation of how far they have fallen off the pace.
At the last round in Spain a swathe of upgrades were hoped to turn around their fortunes. Instead their woes only increased. The car is hugely punishing on its tyres but the problems go far deeper. It is also an issue of the aerodynamics of the ground-effect regulations and it appears the problem, as Mercedes have also admitted previously, is that they do not understand why the car behaves as it does from race to race.
Leclerc declared it undriveable in Barcelona as he managed to qualify only 19th but their lack of race pace
is the real problem in a wider malaise; as Vasseur conceded. “It’s very difficult to understand and to fix it because it’s not always the same problem,” he said. While Leclerc noted a similar frustration: “I don’t understand what we are doing wrong but we are doing something wrong.”
Of most concern for the Scuderia is that Leclerc also said bluntly in Canada this weekend that they had not got any closer to identifying the cause of the problems in Spain. Indeed the only thing that did appear clear going into the meeting at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve was that they all knew something was wrong, if not what it was or how to fix it.
“Overall the team is not satisfied with the performance we are showing at the moment on track,” Leclerc said. “It’s very far off our expectations at the beginning of the season. And yes, we are very clear with ourselves and it’s very clear for us.”
Vasseur has only been in the role since January. It is a baptism of fire for the Frenchman and the biggest challenge of his career. They can add upgrades and development but without a fundamental understanding of the car bringing a predictability of performance, it will remain a wilful ride that cannot be exploited to its peak on regular basis.
Potentially already leapfrogged by Mercedes, who boldly rejected their 2023 design concept as wrong and started again anew successfully in Barcelona with a second and third place, for Ferrari Canada is very much about finding answers to similar questions. The hope of emulating their performance at Le Mans seems to be an awfully long way off.
There was however almost no track running in first practice in Canada. The session was stopped to deal with a stricken Alpine after five minutes but did not resume. After 20 minutes the FIA stated that with CCTV cameras around the track not working, running could not continue for safety reasons. The fault was not able to be fixed and the session was abandoned after 50 minutes. With the agreement of the teams FP2 was extended by 30 minutes to run to 90 minutes.