Ferrari began the 2023 Formula One season with high hopes. In the previous year where the biggest F1 car design rule changes in living memory had come into force, the Scuderia were the best of the rest behind Red Bull Racing winning 4 races to Mercedes single victory.

Yet last years F1 car started the year in disappointing fashion with the team failing to score a single point ate the third round in Australia. While the car had excellent traction in the slower corners, during the Grand Prix the Maranello designed SF-23 literally ate its own tyres making it impossible for Leclerc or Sainz to match the race pace of Mercedes and Red Bull Racing.

 

 

 

 

Ferrari fight back

By the summer break Mercedes were streets ahead of their Italian rivals having scored 247 points to Ferrari’s 201. But with ten races of the year remaining, the Scuderia turned the corner and began quickly eating into their German rivals lead.

Carlos Sainz famously held out against the late charging pair of George Russell and Lewis Hamilton to win the Singapore Grand Prix and coming into the final two races the gap was down to 20 points with Ferrari looking favourite to overhaul the ailing W14.

Yet a circuit unfit for purpose along the Las Vegas strip wrecked the team’s hopes of pipping Mercedes to second in the championship. A loose drain cover minutes into practice one wrecked Sainz car forcing him to fit parts that would see him receive a grid drop for the race. Leclerc looked as though he could claim victory until a late mistake draw him re-passed by Max Verstappen, but a solid drive from Sainz to P6 meant the gap was now down to just four points with one race to go.

Yet Sainz was to have another difficult weekend finishing outside the points meaning even though Leclerc was P2 for the second tine in a week, the Mercedes pair score just one point less than the Monegasque driver handing them the bargain rights to the best of the rest behind Red Bull by just 3 points.

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New concepts for Mercedes and the Scuderia

Going into the winter both teams declared they were going to ditch the concepts behind their 2023 cars and design something new. Fred Vasseur claimed at the Maranello Christmas bash to reporters, ”We are changing 95% of the components of the car. Perhaps you can consider that it’s a revolution.”

Toto Wolff made a similar suggestion following disappointment at the final race of the season. “We’re changing the concept, we’re completely moving away from how we laid out the chassis, the weight distribution, the air flow. Literally, there’s almost every component being changed, because only by doing that, I think we have a chance.”

So after two rounds of the 2024 F1 championship its clear who has done the better job over the winter. Ferrari have almost double the points of their silver rivals (49), while Mercedes are languishing in fourth (26) behind a resurgent McLaren (28).

Lewis Hamilton’s demeanour after finishing in just ninth place in Jeddah clearly revealed he has already lost hope of even winning just one race this year. The seven times world champion is languishing down in ninth place in the drivers’ championship (8 points) with rookie and one time F1 racer Oli Bearman behind him with just two points less.

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Russell out qualifies Hamilton again

George Russell has out qualified his senior team mate in the last four Grand Prix and finished ahead of Lewis in the last three. Having announced his move to Ferrari next year the present moment is bitter sweet given he can see the car his future employer has right now, but he is likely to end his Mercedes career with possibly a record worst season.

Fred Vasseur is bullish after the races in Bahrain and Saudi and believes his team have halved there gap to Red Bull Racing and have more to come.

With the dust settling from the weekend’s racing, the Scuderia boss claims:

“It is never easy to have a clear picture on the race performance because you don’t know when the guys are pushing. But if you compare with one year ago, plus or minus two-tenths, we were at 1.1s [behind Red Bull], and now it is four, five or six-tenths so we have halved the gap.”

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Ferrari halve the gap to RBR

Analysis of the data proverbs Vasseur is not exaggerating. At the 2023 Bahrain Grand Prix the best placed Ferrari driver, Carlos Sainz, finished 48 seconds behind Red Bull’s winning driver Max Verstappen. This year it was Sainz again who was best of the Scuderia drivers, but the gap was down to 25 seconds as the chequered flag fell.

In Saudi Arabia 2023, Sainz was again the best of the Maranelo pilots finishing 35 seconds behind the leading Red Bull car. This year the deficit was cut by Charles Leclerc to just 18 seconds when he crossed the finish line.

Its hardly surprising that Ferrari are bullish with Vasseur explaining, “the performance is coming from everywhere, and it is never that you have one bullet which can bring five-tenths to the car, and we must improve on every single area.

“It was the approach last year and at the end, it did well as we made a decent step, but on every single area, we have to continue to push, and for sure the aero is always key.”

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Upgrades coming from Maranello

All this is good news for Lewis Hamilton’s hopes next season as he makes the switch to drive to the end of his career in red. Yet for this year the news is not so good as an upbeat Vasseur believes his team will be making further inroads into Red Bull’s lead very soon.

“We have upgrades in the pipeline, but I am sure that so does everybody else, and the most important thing is not to bring upgrades – but to bring upgrades that you can operate on the car it is where last year, we did a good job.”

With 1-2 finishes for Red Bull at the first two races of the season the hope of a title race is already looking forlorn. Yet if the Ferrari upgrades work better than those from Milton Keynes, not only will the pole position shootouts become ever more exciting, but a win for the Scuderia may well be on the cars before the start of the European season.

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