Charles Leclerc is pinning his hopes for the rest of the season on a rule change which will come into force at round nine.
The FIA confirmed before the season began it will impose tougher stiffness checks on teams’ front wings from the ninth round of the championship in Spain.Leclerc said Ferrari will have a new front wing design in time for that race and he hopes it will make them more competitive.
“I think we are behind in terms of actual performance of the car,” he explained after scoring his first podium finish of the season with third place on Sunday. “We are behind McLaren and Red Bull, for sure, behind Mercedes I believe also.
“On one hand, I’ve gone in the direction that I’ve been speaking of in the last two or three weekends and I feel like I’ve never been as much at ease with the car than I’ve been at the moment. So we are extracting the maximum out of the car.
“We just need a better car. And I think a turning point for the season will be in Barcelona, with a new front wing, I hope it can play a little in our favour.”
After beating Lando Norris to the final podium place by a second in Jeddah, Leclerc said there was no way he could have finished any higher.
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“I think, honestly, we did the perfect race,” he told the official F1 channel. “Today I don’t feel like there was anything more on the table.
“Every lap was really, really good. There were no mistakes. Strategy, perfect. Pit stop, again, perfect: we don’t talk much about our pit stops because whenever they go wrong, we obviously speak about it because you can lose a race with it, but the mechanics are doing an incredible job. I think we have been dominating the pit stop battle since the beginning of the season, and that’s thanks to the hard work they’ve done.
“But overall it’s been the perfect race and today I couldn’t do anything more than a P3.”
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Riccard
22nd April 2025, 7:44
“I feel like I’ve never been as much at ease with the car than I’ve been at the moment. So we are extracting the maximum out of the car.”
I wonder if part of Lewis’s issue is that previously, his cars have been fast and balanced/compliant… one comes with the other.
In this generation of cars, we here from both Red Bull and McLaren that the speed really comes when they move out of their comfort zone and go somewhere unstable.
Is Lewis’s side of the garage at Ferrari optimising for the wrong thing?
I get that Lewis also isn’t driving as well as he used to, but that doesn’t have to be the only thing going on.
Riccard
22nd April 2025, 7:46
Actually, I’ve had a reading comprehension fail because this was Leclerc rather than Lewis. Sorry!
However, I still wonder whether Ferrari might be optimising for the wrong thing when you compare their comments to other teams.
anon
23rd April 2025, 13:50
It’s still an applicable comment, as it sounds like neither driver is completely happy with the car.
Part of it does seem to be that the current cars aren’t aerodynamically stable under combined braking and turning, and don’t favour late braking either. During the Bahrain GP, there were corners where Hamilton was being advised to brake earlier, which Leclerc was, so the car didn’t pitch as much through the corner.
Another issue seems to be the overall handling balance of the car. There are reports that the car has problems with understeer on initial turn in, followed by oversteer on exit.
It’s a problem for both of them, but it’s claimed that it’s easier for Leclerc to cope with those issues, particularly the understeer on turn in – partially because he was used to those issues on earlier cars, and partially because of the way that he turns in to the corner.
Ferrari do seem to have tried to get better airflow beneath the car by changing the front suspension, but it’s coming at the cost of poorer front end response (with other issues cropping up elsewhere, supposedly relating to changes to the gearbox that are causing some of the rear instability).
pcxmac (@pcxmac)
27th April 2025, 19:47
Lewis doesn’t have a problem driving, he was fantastic last year when conditions were such that he could break through.
I suspect that while his engineers were busy ignoring him at Mercedes from 2022-2024, Lewis might really have been left to his own devices. Given how poor his race engineering was, IMO, it really sounded like Lewis was just driving at Mercedes while the rest of the team was helping George sort things out.
Fast forward to Ferrari, it appears (IMO), that Charles is a driver who drives around issues, but doesn’t really solve them. His career has been so inconsistent, because the engineers don’t really know what they are doing, going back many years, many years. Maybe since Ross Brawn left and perhaps there was a bit of a brain drain at the time.
If I had to put my money on one particular issue, its that Lewis has kind of been on his own the whole ‘ground effects era’ and he doesn’t really know what he needs out of the car, or how to set it up. So he favors a car that is as consistent as possible, w/ respect to ground floor height, in order to keep low pressures under the car, as low as possible, which is great, but not over race distance.
For Lewis it sounds like the problem is, he does not know how to setup his driving and the car for when the height / roll / pitch is such that the seal of the floor is broken, and the pressure rises under the floor, and the flow out the diffuser is disrupted and he loses massive amounts of traction.
Ferrari have mentioned they have issues with their floor. But I suspect Lewis needs a proper race engineer, or a staff of engineers who can help him QUANTIFY (mathematically) the optimal race setup, and how to race ‘around’ the floor breaches, when he needs to keep the floor completely flat against the surface, and when is the worst-best time to break the seal of the floor to achieve a certain driving effect.
Not only does Lewis (IMO) need tire temps on his steering wheel. But he also needs to be able to see the air pressure under the floor (maybe on all four corners), as well as the flow rate into the diffuser/s, to understand what he can do optimize at or near the apex, or at corner turn in, or at make braking, or at corner exit, how to better position for turns, to optimize for the ‘seal’ of the floor against the track surface.
Also, Ferrari, probably need to understand the maximum deflection points of the floor (downward) and tune them to all four corners, and optimize how the floor reacts to turning/braking, and how to setup up a floor so that it ‘counters’ (like camber on a wheel) instead of maybe producing negative effects.
pcxmac (@pcxmac)
27th April 2025, 19:54
The big problem that ground effects era cars suffer from, is the disparity of down force between when the floor is ‘sealed’ to the racing surface, and when it unseals itself (due to pitch/roll/yaw?) It would be like experiencing extra winds if you didn’t know what was going on, trying to understand why down force keeps dropping out.
Honestly I think the guys at Merc did fk all for HAM his last 3 years, and that was probably to protect F1’s latest and greatest idol to be. Because if toto wanted to ditch HAM, its probably pretty safe to assume, that a lot of other ‘stake holders’ cant stand him, probably because he’s “too old”, maybe because he ditched the awards gala after he was cheated his 8th championship, or maybe because F1 really hasn’t changed it’s ways, even if it spent the last number of years “letting” Lewis win, cynically, to pretend it’s better than it really is.
OOliver
22nd April 2025, 11:26
Lewis is using new brakes he is not familiar with. He has also talked about finding the balance with their engine braking. Lewis is also older and has become risk averse.
Finally these ground effect cars are more suitable to those who play video games. The cars don’t give much feedback so you just have to ignore the car and drive without sensation.
MichaelN
22nd April 2025, 14:19
One thing that is very key in all this speculation is the Shanghai Sprint where he took pole and won.
Why was that? And why did it suddenly change when Ferrari made their for-the-GP setup changes.
We’re probably talking about minuscule differences here, but that’s how these guys work.
And yes, I’m aware that McLaren’s duo didn’t exactly put their best foot forward in China – but be that as it may – he was still faster than Verstappen and Leclerc, so that’s also worth something.
Fer no.65 (@fer-no65)
22nd April 2025, 9:37
I wonder how much Lewis is influencing Ferrari in a bad way. Because half of the garage is trying to make it work with him, while they try to gain performance. Maybe keeping Sainz would relieve them of that variable, as you know what you’re working with those two pair of hands.
OOliver
22nd April 2025, 11:33
Sainz and Leclerc like their cars setup in almost opposite directions.
One the Ferrari has established is that they are not as fast as they assumed they were.
SteveP
22nd April 2025, 18:07
Or you could say that maybe Lewis is influencing Ferrari in a good way and that is why Leclerc is saying the car feels so much easier to drive.
Nulla Pax (@nullapax)
22nd April 2025, 11:53
Pinning your hopes on a rule change, that comes into effect over a third of the way into the season, does not sound very encouraging to me.
David BR (@david-br)
22nd April 2025, 16:30
@nullapax Nope indeed.
Riccard
22nd April 2025, 17:50
At the point he made the comment, the rule change is 4 races away… 15 of 19 remaining race weekends, or about 79%, will fall under those new rules.
It’s reasonable to look to upgrades 4 race weekends in the future, and fairly common to talk about that kind of delivery time.
AlexS
22nd April 2025, 21:34
It is not not but it is the only thing he can pin is hopes since the rule change for 26 will mean most resources soon would be put in a quite different car.