Charles Leclerc was one of the shock exits in Silverstone qualifying, failing to reach Q3. When told about his elimination on team radio, Leclerc’s reaction was not necessarily anger but acceptance. The Monegasque, much like his teammate, has struggled for stability and overall performance all weekend. The last 48 hours on British soil have only confirmed that Ferrari are experiencing a very concerning decline.
After the Monaco GP, nobody would have suggested that Ferrari were the fourth-fastest team. However, since their Spanish GP upgrade package, they have taken a step backwards relative to their direct opponents.
Mercedes are progressing at an impressive rate, with the W15 capable of podiums on a bad day and race victories on a good day. Unlike the Scuderia, Mercedes are confident their upgrades will generate the performance they were designed to. Their trajectory is overwhelmingly positive, and it seems likely to stay that way.
For Fred Vasseur’s team, who were Red Bull’s closest challengers until recently, the opposite is true. The upgrades brought to the SF-24 have not worked. The situation is so dire that Leclerc and Sainz abandoned the Spain upgrades and fitted the Imola-spec car for qualifying.
Leclerc: Ferrari are in a difficult period
Speaking to the media on Saturday, Leclerc was a dejected figure, having finished the day in P11:
“We are just slow – we are just really slow at the moment. We have a lot of inconsistencies with the car.
“I don’t think it quite helps [that] we are trying to assess the situation at the moment. Understand the directions in which we need to push in.
“I felt like yesterday, by splitting the cars, we understood a good amount to use for the future. However, that means maybe you don’t optimise your whole weekend, as you are just focused on how to learn…
“At the moment, we are just struggling with the situation we are in. I hope we can bounce back as soon as possible.”
With McLaren, Mercedes and Max Verstappen consistently at the front, Ferrari cannot afford to have more weekends like this one.
Whilst wet conditions could help them for the British GP, nothing can reverse the SF-24s’s fundamental lack of performance at this stage. It is now imperative for the Maranello engineers to understand why their upgrades are creating porpoising – and how to combat this moving forward.
Unless Ferrari can get on top of their issues, they will struggle to make substantive progress in the second half of 2024. In such a competitive field, as Aston Martin demonstrated earlier this year, mistakes in development are extremely costly and are difficult to recover from.
There is no short-term fix for Ferrari, and even in the medium to long term, there is no guarantee of a fast recovery. In the time that Vasseur’s engineers take to understand their core issues, they could find themselves several steps away from the front.
