Despite Maranello and their main F1 rival being fairly evenly matched during the first half of the season, Red Bull has been unstoppable of late, with Max Verstappen winning the last five races despite only starting from pole once. time.
After losing again to Red Bull at last weekend’s Italian Grand Prix, Ferrari says it is looking at the data to try to better understand how things have changed in recent weeks.
During Friday practice at Monza, he had Carlos Sainz test some old ground to see if recent developments to his F1-75 have really been a step backwards and are hurting the balance of the car.
And although the team still hopes to introduce some improvements later this season (for example new wings and a new floor at the Singapore Grand Prix), his boss Mattia Binotto believes it is essential that he gets to the bottom of why he cannot match Red Bull on tire life right now.
Binotto believes the trend changed for his team at the Hungarian GP, when main title contender Charles Leclerc began to struggle to match Verstappen.
“I think we not only have to review the previous three races, but the last four, because it would also include Hungary,” he explained.
“In the last few rounds, I think the performance of the Red Bulls has been better than ours. Not in qualifying, because I see that on Saturdays we still have a good rhythm, so let me say that the pure performance is still there.”
“But then, race pace-wise, we’re getting a lot of tire degradation. In that sense, I think Red Bull is a better car, so they’ve been able to develop that car for a better balance than us.
“The reason? It’s something we’re looking at, because we have to address it. If not for this season, then certainly for the next.”
In his speech at Monza last weekend, Binotto suggested that the degradation of the Ferrari’s tires was being caused by the car’s balance being far from optimal and that it makes the tires skid too much -and therefore generates more temperature-. .
“If we look back at the last few races, where in terms of tire degradation we weren’t the best, we certainly had problems with the balance of the car,” he explained.
“The fact of having an open balance, from medium-high speed to low speed corners, generated overheating in the tires themselves, which in a way leads to degradation. So, we know that the balance of the car was not The right one”.
“The reason for the poor balance was due to the aerodynamic developments that got us to that point. It was an unknown quantity for us.”
