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Red Bull ended Formula 1’s pre-season test hiding little on-track or off it. Ferrari, likely to start the season as its main opposition, was a different matter.
While Red Bull bolted on softer tyres in the evening when the track had cooled and Sergio Perez set the fastest time of the test, and other teams undertook their final performance runs as well, Ferrari’s run plan meant it slid down the order.
Doing performance work earlier in the day meant drivers Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz ended the test fourth and fifth on the timesheets, seven tenths adrift of Perez and behind a Mercedes and an Alfa Romeo. It left a bigger question mark over where Ferrari’s true pace may be.
Still, Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur assured a small group of media, including The Race, on the final day of the test: “When we put everything together the pace looks OK.” And there was a calm confidence about the team’s three days in Bahrain.
Though the consensus was that Red Bull has a small advantage on low and high fuel, Ferrari indicated it was happy to have achieved its own objectives for testing.
A big effort to improve reliability over the winter has so far matched up on track with the assurances seen on the dyno, and the car has been put through extensive work exploring extreme set-up options.
Vasseur’s message became clear: Ferrari has been scanning a lot of items, testing a lot of ideas, the car looks OK performance-wise and reliability is strong.
“’Confident’ is always relative compared to the others and we don’t have a clear picture about the others,” he said.
“The only picture that you will have will be next week.
“I’m confident because reliability was OK, we covered good mileage, we ticked the boxes of what we have to scan. And this was the best approach.
“I’m quite happy with what we have done these three days but the most important thing in the winter test is to be able to do mileage.
“It looks to be a detail when you are doing mileage. But when you are not it’s a disaster.
“We were able to do it and do it properly.”
Unlike some other teams, Ferrari had little interest in running the C4 or C5 tyre in the evening, even when track conditions had cooled. The best laps came on the C4 – Leclerc’s 1m31.024s early in the morning, just half an hour into the day, while Sainz’s 1m31.036s was set in the middle of the afternoon.
Sainz’s run of performance laps in the afternoon briefly put Ferrari one and two in the times but Vasseur had little interest reading into the pecking order at that point.
He said it was “irrelevant” to be competitive at high temperatures and that, even with Red Bull looking so strong, it would be a “mistake” to go for a more like-for-like comparison at the end of the day: “If you start to change because Red Bull is faster or slower, we lose the path of the three days.”
Like all teams, Ferrari defined that ‘path’ well in advance. Unfortunately for anyone wanting more of a glimpse of the Ferrari’s potential in the evening, its logic was that to focus on “trying to put everything together at 7pm because the track is the quickest at this stage” would mean “losing your day”. The implication being that set-up work through the day would end up tailored to what was needed late on.
Despite this, there were inevitably clues to where Ferrari is – hence the conviction many people have that it is a little bit adrift on pure pace and perhaps a little further on longer runs.
Longer running on race fuel is where teams can hide the least, although track conditions and engine modes still make the picture foggy at best. And this did not paint a great picture for Ferrari, for there were again signs of worse tyre degradation, which was a 2022 weakness versus the Red Bull.
The drivers acknowledged that there was some work to do and Vasseur didn’t hide that Ferrari had some runs where things did not work so well.
“It’s quite normal that the drivers, they have to be unhappy because it’s a mindset and a focus on performance and improvement,” he said.
“Now we have to do a deep analysis of all these things, to try to understand the level of fuel and to know if we were pushing or not.
“Some stints were very good, some a bit less but it’s also the purpose of this session to try to scan all the options.”
That last point was in reference to Leclerc. One observation was that Leclerc struggled more to get comfortable with the SF-23 than Sainz.
“It was not obvious this morning,” Vasseur said on the final afternoon of the test.
“Yesterday he struggled a little bit but we were also at this stage scanning extreme options.
“But again, it’s not a surprise. You have three days of testing, you have to scan the options. And some of the options won’t work.
“This morning, we came back, I think the last performance lap was very good. And he did it when the track was very hot.
“This performance was a good one. And I’m quite happy with the job done by Charles. It’s a good improvement.”
Ferrari did end the test with a more assured-looking car. So, to say Ferrari improved and had a productive test overall looks like a fair assessment.
But anyone fearing a season of Red Bull dominance will now be on tenterhooks until Friday practice to find out how close Ferrari is when everyone is on track at the same time, in the conditions, pushing for the same goal.
Testing was never likely to yield a definitive answer. Diverging run plans just guaranteed that the ‘direct’ comparisons many would have hoped to see never quite materialised.
