For Charles Leclerc, there is no sugar-coating the first half of Ferrari’s 2023 season which didn’t go well, but the Monegasque says the team at least headed in F1’s summer break “on a positive note”.
A look at the standings paints a disappointing picture for the Italian outfit and its drivers, with Leclerc sitting only fifth in the championship – a whopping 215 points behind the inaccessible Max Verstappen – while his Scuderia teammate Carlos Sainz is further adrift in seventh position.
In the Constructors’ standings, Ferrari is fourth behind Red Bull, Mercedes and Aston Martin.
The relatively depressed stats are a far cry from what the House of Maranello was expecting in 2023.
After challenging for the world title in the first half of last season, Ferrari – now with Fred Vasseur at the helm – and Leclerc had set their sights on ironing out the reliability issues, strategic missteps and personal errors that had undermined the second part of its campaign in 2022.
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While most of those crucial weaknesses were defeated, the performance level of Ferrari’s SF-23 has been both inconsistent and inadequate relative to Red Bull’s dominant RB19.
“It didn’t go well,” conceded Leclerc at Spa before heading into his summer break.
“Before the first race, the target was to go a step better compared to last year, which was to win the world championship.
“If we look at the first half of the year, we are very far from where we put our expectations before the season.”
Despite the frustrating shortfall, Leclerc was happy to conclude the first half of his campaign on a double positive note: his podium in Spa and Ferrari’s strong reaction to its plight.
“As soon as we understood, we reset, and there was an incredible reaction from the team,” he said.
“They brought upgrades, some a month and a half early, and this requires a lot of effort from everybody at Maranello.
“It has helped us have great results, although we still need to try to understand because if I take a step back, in the last two races we expected to be much more competitive in Budapest than Spa. In the end, it’s the opposite.
“So these are the things we need to look at because maybe we didn’t optimise the package in races like Budapest, and maybe we’ve done something that was surprisingly good on a track like Spa.”
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