Charles Leclerc set to be ignored as Ferrari engineers plan drastic action

Ferrari look set to ignore Charles Leclerc’s desire to understand and improve the SF-23 this season with reports emerging from Italy that the Scuderia plan to tear up their plans and start over in the design process for their 2024 challenger.

After commencing the 2022 season with a car capable of battling and beating Red Bull, Ferrari had hoped to kickstart the 2023 campaign in a similar fashion, but the SF-23 remains a frustrating car for both Leclerc and team-mate Carlos Sainz.

With the summer break now underway, Ferrari are languishing in P4 in the Constructors’ Championship, and if McLaren continue their meteoric rise, it’s not inconceivable that the Scuderia could end 2023 with a fifth-place finish to their name. Drastic changes are needed and Motorsport.com claim that’s what will be happening with Ferrari engineers ready to scrap their car design and start from a ‘blank canvas’ for next season.

The team back at Maranello will reportedly move away from the ‘belly-pit’ sidepod style for the 2024 project, instead aligning the Ferrari’s aerodynamic design with that of the RB19.

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While it will be tempting for teams to copy as many parts from Red Bull’s history-making 2023 car as possible next, emulation will not be enough to usurp Red Bull. Instead, it’s said that Ferrari will make some extreme design choices, with all teams needing to differentiate to avoid producing a grid stacked with suboptimal RB19 clones.

Ferrari’s performances are improving though. Leclerc claimed his third podium of the season at the previous round in Belgium, comfortably holding off seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton in his successful bid to finish as best of the rest behind the two Red Bull drivers. 

Despite such an impressive performance, the Monegasque driver wasn’t totally satisfied with the state of affairs in the Ferrari camp. “It’s not a completely happy face because we are still very far from Red Bull and this is our target,” Leclerc told Sky Sports F1 after his Belgian Grand Prix podium.

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“On the other hand, after such a difficult first part of the season, it’s good to finish this half that way. I think something interesting we should look into is our competitiveness from Budapest to Belgium.”

“Before these two races, I would have bet that Budapest would suit our track most,” Leclerc continued. “If you look at the two races, we were much stronger in Belgium than Budapest. This is what we need to understand in order to maximise our package in every race for the second half of the season because maybe we didn’t understand that there.”

It looks like Leclerc could bid farewell to the SF-23 without ever truly understanding the car’s behaviour, with next year’s machinery set to follow a very different and hopefully more fruitful development path.

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