As Charles Leclerc & Co Continue Sinking in the Nightmare, Ferrari CEO Vows a Miraculous Recovery

“A car that will have no precedents in terms of speed,” said CEO Benedetto Vigna at the presentation SF-23 at the beginning of the 2023 F1 season. After coming so close to winning the championship, we hoped for Ferrari to come back with a better car to challenge the Red Bulls in the title fight. However, the sport’s most famous team appears to have further fallen back, and 2023 already turned out to be Ferrari’s worst season yet. The worst part is the same old Ferrari problems- a combination of poor reliability and strategic errors – persisted from last season. Although Charles Leclerc‘s podium finish in Baku felt like Ferrari’s resurrection, the ‘engine saga’ continued from the next race, and even in the Spanish Grand Prix. 

Charles Leclerc made a shock early exit from Qualifying on Saturday amidst unclear ‘car complaints’. After making overnight changes to his car, despite Ferrari having found nothing to be mechanically wrong with his SF-23, it resulted in a pit lane start. Leclerc had a slightly improved Sunday. However, he didn’t produce enough pace to make it into the points and finished 11th, behind Alpine’s Pierre Gasly. On the other hand, Carlos Sainz put in a stunning lap to qualify in second place, however, that also ended in disappointment. During the race, he had to make a pit stop as he didn’t have ‘enough’ pace to match the Mercedes behind him, which resulted in a P5 finish – a clear sign that the Maranello team is far away as ever from glory. However, CEO Vigna promised Ferrari’s resurgence by quoting a Japanese proverb.

Vigna participated in the Bloomberg Capital Market Forum, and while being interviewed by the moderator Tommaso Ebhardt, he said, “Nana korobi ya oki,” in Japanese. It means: “Fall seven times and get up eight.” Vigna used this quote to frame the difficult moment Scuderia Ferrari is going through in F1 in 2023. “It applies to life, it also applies to F1″–continued Vigna after quoting the proverb–”it’s not easy, sometimes you slip four floors and you don’t see the end. But with work, with passion, with skills, and with your heart, you eventually recover. I’ve been there many times.” [Translated via Google]

Read More: Despite Brutally Slamming Ferrari for Spain Nightmare, Dejected Charles Leclerc Still Looks at the Silver Lining

However, after an S-pain-ish weekend, the Ferrari boys bemoaned their struggles in SF-23 and looked hopeless. 

Ferrari weaknesses “came alive” in Spain: Carlos Sainz

Leclerc’s Saturday struggles were made more bizarre by the fact his teammate Carlos Sainz secured a front-row start alongside pole-sitter Verstappen at his home race. However, Sainz didn’t have the race pace to match his Qualifying performance to do what was expected of him- a second-place finish. Moreover, Ferrari’s struggles were emphasized by a massively improved display from Mercedes with a double-podium finish.

Reflecting on his race, Sainz said, “Honestly, I just spent the whole race managing tires because we know we are very hard on them and with this high degradation circuit, I just couldn’t push. We know it’s a weakness of our car and coming to a high degradation circuit and a two-stop race, we were just managing the whole way trying to make it to the target laps of the stints and still falling short in a few of them.” 

Speaking about how the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya only highlighted Ferrari’s weaknesses, the Spaniard further added, “The weaknesses of our car are coming alive on a circuit like this with the high-speed corners and how hard we are on tires. But it also shows that yesterday we must have done a pretty good lap. I think today was again, a bit back to where the car is at the moment in race pace, and yeah, probably this sort of track is not great for us.”

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After several crashes and penalties, the Maranello team finds itself in fourth position in the Constructors’ standings with only one podium to its credit.