Charles Leclerc has some bad news for the Tifosi and isn’t expecting a big turnaround in form for Ferrari at the 2024 Dutch Grand Prix in Zandvoort this weekend, with the Monegasque instead hoping to get the most out of the team’s current package.
After winning two races earlier in the 2024 F1 season, the Scuderia’s performance has dropped off at recent events. With Red Bull, along with McLaren and Mercedes, consistently faster than Ferrari before the summer break, the team have been unable to capitalise on the momentum that Leclerc’s win at Monaco delivered.
Recent upgrades haven’t made the SF-24 take the next step forward and become a consistent challenger at the front of the F1 grid, and Leclerc admits he isn’t expecting that to change at the Dutch GP.
“I don’t expect us at this race to come back to the level of form we saw before Monaco because before Monaco we had the pace in the car to do these kind of things,” Leclerc told select members of the press, including Total-Motorsport.com, “Now we don’t.
“We’ve had five or six races after Monaco where we were just doing extreme things with the setup which was not optimal to optimize our race weekends.
“However in the last two races before the break we did optimize the points that we could take with our car. So that’s the target for now until we’ve got the pace again.
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“We’ve got to just focus on maximising our weekends, maximising the points that we can take in order to lose the least number of points to our competitors.
“Then once we have our upgrades that will be enough to put us back into the fight.”
Leclerc confident in Ferrari ability to develop car
Even though Ferrari have fallen behind their competitors after introducing new upgrades, Leclerc tempered the bad bad news and doesn’t believe the team struggles when it comes to development.
“I don’t think it’s a tendency that we struggle with development. We’ve encountered quite a few issues recently – we had the bouncing for a few races which we struggled with,” said Leclerc.
“We’re starting to get better with [it], so hopefully those new upgrades will hopefully help a bit. Alongside other characteristics we’ve seen, we’re a little bit weaker compare to the others.”
When asked what it is that has resulted in Ferrari’s drop in form, Leclerc was very clear – an overall lack of performance.
“Just performance, just overall performance. We are just not fast enough,” said Leclerc.
“If you look at Budapest or Spa our car is in a good place. It’s not like we have a particular issue. As I said, the car is a little bit peaky. We still have bouncing in some places which we have to make some compromises to avoid.
“These things make us go slower. All these little details then don’t make us find the performance we want.”
