What Ferrari will turn up at the Italian GP live on Sky Sports F1 this weekend? After a challenging Zandvoort, the team remain fourth in the standings – what’s gone wrong in 2023 and what are the plans for change for 2024?
Wednesday 30 August 2023 21:53, UK
It's become the perennial question when F1 heads for Monza in the fading weeks of summer: just when are Ferrari going to win the world championship again?
It is 307 races and nearly 16 years since Kimi Raikkonen became the ninth driver to take a title wearing motorsport's most famous red.
With Red Bull and Max Verstappen sweeping all before them so far this year, Ferrari have found themselves in an entertaining and close, yet wildly inconsistent, battle for the remaining scraps left behind F1's runaway reigning champions.
Two pole positions, three podium finishes and fourth place in the Constructors' Championship reads like an underwhelming season for a team of such stature and, fresh from a poor showing last weekend in Zandvoort, it's that record they take into their biggest weekend of the year where almost all eyes in the grandstands will be on the performance of the two red cars.
So what's happened to Ferrari's form this year, a world away from that immense early promise shown at the start of 2022? And what are the now-Frederic Vasseur-led team doing to turn things around heading towards 2024?
The SF-23 certainly hasn't been the car Ferrari hoped it would be.
In fact, they admit they knew that was the case from its very first full test back in Bahrain in late February. A test which had been very different to the one the year before when the Scuderia seemed the ones to have aced the start of F1's new regulation era.
"We think that our main weakness is on the aero characteristics of the car," explained Enrico Cardile, Ferrari's head of chassis, to the media in Zandvoort last week.
"So all the focus since T1 [the Bahrain test] when it has been pretty clear that we were not at the level we expected to be, the weakness was coming from there.
"All the focus, all the efforts has been since T1 on improving the aero characteristics of the car."
That's not to say that the 2023 challenger hasn't had its moments, particularly in qualifying with poles in Azerbaijan and Belgium (albeit only after a Verstappen grid penalty) and near-misses elsewhere like in Austria.
But over the longer distance of grands prix things have regularly been a different story, as evidenced by those fleeting visits to the podium - four fewer than Aston Martin alone.
"It's no secret this year we have lacked some consistency from the car," said Carlos Sainz last week.
"It's very difficult to predict which circuits we are going to be quick on, which we are not going to be quick at."
Sainz added: "We very quickly identified what the main weakness of the cars is. This we know. Then there's other things like predicting which tracks you are going to be better at compared to others. There's the wind sensitivity, there's track temperature sensitivity that we have, which at the moment makes it a very peaky car."
Driving an inconsistent car, the drivers again certainly haven't been infallible, while the team's strategy on track has also been questioned.
Repeating last year's second-place finish to Red Bull ahead of Mercedes in the constructors' standings already appears a tall order, while Aston Martin's improved form in the Netherlands has also added a twist to the current battle for third after Ferrari had appeared to have the better development momentum heading into the break.
Vasseur, who joined as replacement for Mattia Binotto in January, and Cardile both confirmed in the build-up to last week's race that next year's car would be much-changed.
"It will be very different, because developing this year's car we realised that some architectural choices we did were not right. It was constraining the development too much," said Cardile.
"From there next year's car will not be an evolution of this year's car like this year's car has been compared to last year's car, but it will be a brand new car - different chassis with different design, different rear end to allow our aero [department] to better develop the car to achieve their targets."
Although more guarded about detail, Vasseur added after Sunday's race: "I don't want to speak about the next year's car but for sure it's a different project, it's a different project for everybody.
"We are all trying to extract the best from the regulations and to do a step forward."
Yet Ferrari have also made clear that with nine races left in this season, they remain focused on making things better for 2023 too.
In addition to further physical improvements to the SF-23 - "we have some upgrades to come in the next couple of races," confirmed Vasseur - they are having been using practice sessions to conduct specific tests to learn about the weakness the 2023 car possesses.
"We are trying something different in FP1s and FP2s every weekend to try and understand these regulations and try to see where we may be lacking compared to Red Bull and how we can make the 2024 car quicker," said Sainz.
"We are also spending a lot of time in the simulator, trying different things. We are spending more time than ever really on getting the season turned around and putting everything that we can to get ourselves in a better place for next year."
Cardile was adamant that Ferrari do understand where the current car's faults lie and what to do about them for 2024.
"For us, it is crystal clear what we did wrong with the car," he insisted.
"Which are the weaknesses is clear. It's not a matter of understanding what we should do. Now, for the future, it's a matter of delivering a good product which will cope with the targets we have.
"So, we are not in nowhere land."
"To not shop is to go backwards," stated Vasseur in the latest edition of F1's Beyond the Grid podcast.
It's no secret that Ferrari have been on a hiring spree this year from rival teams and, while the arrival of personnel is rarely instant in a sport where gardening leave periods can be long, Vasseur has recently confirmed there will be new faces into Maranello in the each of the short, medium and longer-term (up to 2025).
"We need to improve but we can do a better job with what we have today and we have to be focused on trying to get the best from what we have," he said.
"It's not that we will have three or five or 10 people that will join the team in the next 18 months and it will change completely the philosophy and the potential of the team. There is not a before and after."
Five and three years respectively into occupying what historically are the two most prized seats in F1, Leclerc and Sainz could naturally have expected by now to have had a car with which to mount a full-season shot at the world title.
The fact they haven't has inevitably raised questions about their futures with both on contracts that run to the end of 2024.
Leclerc's situation has been scrutinised more closely, particularly as it is widely perceived that the 25-year-old's shows of anger on team radio when things go wrong on track reflect frustration about the lack of progress.
Vasseur, who originally worked with Leclerc in the Monegasque's first year of F1 at Sauber in 2018, said: "I can't imagine Charles after five years in F1 not [being] frustrated with the current result. It has to be part of the motivation.
"You can't be happy with this when the challenge was to win. It's not that you have to blame someone and so [on], but the frustration also has to be part of the motivation."
Leclerc denied reports that surfaced during the summer break that a new post-2024 deal had been agreed, although Vasseur did say on Sunday night that they were "starting to discuss" the future.
Speaking to F1, Vasseur also disclosed that while there was no rush for the team to resolve the drivers' longer-term futures right now, he had told them it would be sorted before the end of this year. "I told them we will fix it before the end of the year, and I will do it."
All sessions from the Italian GP will be live on Sky Sports F1 from this Friday, before the race itself takes place with coverage beginning at 12.30pm on Sunday. Stream F1 on Sky Sports with NOW for just £26 a month for 12 months. Cancel anytime
