There was no starker contrast in the Spanish Grand Prix paddock than between Mercedes and Ferrari.
Mercedes was buoyed by Barcelona’s validation of its philosophy-changing upgrade package. Both cars finished on the podium, even splitting Red Bull Racing teammates Max Verstappen and Sergio Pérez, and the future looked a little brighter.
Less talked about was that Ferrari was also running a major car upgrade featuring a significant bodywork redesign and floor modifications.
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It amounted to a notable change in the way the car’s aerodynamics work, which appeared to contradict team principal Frédéric Vasseur’s earlier insistence that the team wasn’t contemplating a concept change to address its poor form.
The new-look car isn’t a straight Red Bull Racing copy, but it’s certainly a step in that general direction.
“The concept for me doesn’t mean something that we are taking direction [from] on the development with the shape of the sidepod,” Vasseur said, talking around his previous denials of a concept change.
“At one stage when you are struggling with development we say, ‘Okay, let’s take another direction, we will unlock potential new development’ and it’s what we did with this package.
“We have new parts and upgrades coming for the next races, and we will make some steps.”
Yet on the new car’s first outing Ferrari slumped to one of its worst weekends of the season.
An unspecified mechanical problem left Charles Leclerc starting at the back of the grid, from where he failed to score points.
Carlos Sainz qualified on the front row but was powerless in his descent to fifth at the flag, the only consolation being that he finished ahead of Lance Stroll and Fernando Alonso.
But it wasn’t enough to outscore Aston Martin on a rare off weekend for the green team, leaving Ferrari an increasingly distant fourth in the constructors standings.
After seven rounds and as good as a third of the way through the season, Ferrari’s campaign looks at risk of coming off the rails.
STANDING STILL IS GOING BACKWARDS
So far this season Ferrari has been able to lean on its strong qualifying pace as evidence that the SF-23 can be fundamentally quick.
On average this year it’s been comfortably Red Bull Racing’s closest Saturday challenger. But while Sainz was second on Saturday in Spain, the car’s one-lap advantage had largely dissipated.
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Ferrari’s qualifying pace, season average
Deficit to Red Bull Racing: 0.243 seconds
Advantage over Mercedes: 0.367 seconds
Ferrari’s qualifying pace, Spain
Deficit to Red Bull Racing: 0.462 seconds
Advantage over Mercedes: 0.084 seconds
Not only was Ferrari way further off pole, but Hamilton was significantly closer — and he was carrying a maladjusted front wing after his crash with Russell earlier in the session, without which Mercedes thinks he would’ve been a strong chance to start on the front row.
But Sainz thinks Ferrari has its own excuses for underperforming in qualifying.
“Probably we brought [the upgrades] to our weakest track of the season,” he said. “Because of the characteristics of the track, probably we haven’t seen the best of them yet.
“I still believe with the bouncing and the high speed weakness we had we were never going to be very competitive around here.”
Bouncing is a lingering problem for Ferrari. The car oscillates when loaded up with downforce at high speed, and a track like Barcelona, replete with high-speed corners, brings out the worst of this trait.
To eliminate the worst of the bouncing, it seems Ferrari had to run with less downforce than the track ideally required. Effectively the track played to the car’s weaknesses.
There’s also reason to think Mercedes overperformed at least a little bit in Barcelona. It was strong in Spain even with last year’s deeply troubled car, and the team talked about qualifying conditions being ideal for its new machine.
All that considered, you could argue that Ferrari has probably held station on single-lap pace by matching Mercedes’s rate of development, with both ahead of Aston Martin.
But that only applies on Saturday. On Sunday it’s much harder to see the bright side.
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RACE PACE IS GETTING MUCH WORSE
Race pace has been Ferrari’s biggest issue all season, and Spain was arguably the team’s worst showing of the year.
In Bahrain Leclerc was around 10 seconds ahead of Sainz before he retired, in Saudi Arabia both Red Bull Racing drivers were pushing hard in their intrateam battle and in Monaco the team was hamstrung by some poor strategy calls around the arrival of the rain.
All those factors exacerbated deficits at those races, leaving Spain’s representative 45-second gap as the largest of the season to date.
Ferrari’s race deficits
Bahrain: 48.052 seconds (0.843 seconds per lap)
Saudi Arabia: 35.876 seconds (0.718 seconds per lap)
Australia: 1.594 seconds (race finished behind safety car)
Azerbaijan: 21.217 seconds (0.416 seconds per lap)
Miami: 37.511 seconds (0.658 seconds per lap)
Monaco: 61.890 seconds (0.793 seconds per lap)
Spain: 45.698 seconds (0.692 seconds per lap)
Average: 0.687 seconds per lap
Part of the team’s particular Spain struggle come from high tyre wear, which has been an issue since last season. That was exacerbated by the need to run lower downforce to compensate for the bouncing.
But the story goes deeper than just the lap-time deficit and to the car’s unsolvable unpredictability.
All season both Sainz and Leclerc have complained that they can’t anticipate the behaviour of the car from one lap to the next or even from corner to corner. Not only does that sap driver confidence, but it undermines strategy by making it impossible for a driver to hit target lap times across a stint.
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That the problem was largely unimproved in Spain despite the major upgrade is a serious cause for concern.
“It’s not like I’ve got understeer in the car and I can say ‘Okay, this is a very understeery car’,” a thoroughly dispirited Leclerc said after finishing 11th. “I’ve got understeer on one tyre and then you get, again on [another set of] the same hards, an oversteery balance.
“It’s very difficult to work on inconsistencies, especially when you do exactly the same thing on both sets.
“For some reason we seemed to never really get in the right window of the tyre, and when we do it’s a bit of a surprise to us. So there is a lot of work we need to do.”
He summed it up even more succinctly to Sky Sports.
“I don’t understand what we are doing wrong, but we are doing something wrong,” he lamented.
‘IT’S VERY DIFFICULT TO UNDERSTAND’
While team principal Frédéric Vasseur has been consistently optimistic that the car can be turned good this year, he admitted in Spain that the team lack clarity on why it was proving so peaky for the drivers.
“If I knew that, it would be fixed, because we have 1000 people focused on this now,” he said. “It’s very difficult to understand and to fix it, because it’s not always the same problem.
“The issue is more than on the chassis side … because if you had something like this you could say that it’s always there.
“I think we made a step forward [in pace], but consistency is not there.”
The team has tried to boost morale by pointing to its full development pipeline, with new parts due on the car at every race. The major Spanish Grand Prix upgrade was also fast-tracked, having been decided upon after the season had already started.
But given the car’s fundamental problems appear to remain a mystery to the team, it’s difficult to have confidence that a turnaround is on the horizon.
Compare the situation to that at Mercedes, for example, where a blank-slate approach has delivered a car the team feels it already has a much firmer grasp on and has much more confidence about developing.
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The chronic set-up issues that had plagued the German marque for the last season and a bit have been wiped clear, leaving it free to pursue performance upgrades rather than troubleshooting flaws. While the team is playing down expectations, there’s reason to believe it can take some big steps forward from here and potentially compete for wins by the end of the year.
You couldn’t say the same thing about Ferrari.
Vasseur, however, isn’t concerned that the battle to be Red Bull Racing’s closest challenger is slipping away from his team.
“What we can see on our side is that what we brought [to Spain] is paying off in terms of pure performance,” he said. “If you take the picture between Miami, before the upgrade of Mercedes, and today, I think we made a step forward probably in the performance
“On the race you could consider that we made a step forward compared to Aston.
“We made a step forward in terms of potential.
“I think as soon as we will unlock the situation with consistency, we can imagine to fight with them all over the race and probably we will be able to do it depending from track to track on the layout and the tarmac.”
But while keeping pace with Mercedes and Aston Martin has become the intermediate goal, the true objective — winning races — remains stubbornly distant.
“With Red Bull it’s another story, especially with Verstappen,” Vasseur admitted. “He is still much faster than us in quali, much faster in the race. It will be another story.”
For a team that expected to be fighting for the constructors championship this season, that’s the most concerning judgment of all.