Leclerc: The handling of the Ferrari SF-24 is much better

On the second day of testing, the morning session ended much earlier than planned due to a problem with one of the track’s drainage covers, causing damage to the underbody of Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari.

The Scuderia racer spoke about this situation and generally shared his impressions of the new car created in Maranello.

Charles Leclerc: “The underside of the car was not too badly damaged, but there was still a hole in it, so it had to be replaced. To be honest, this drain cover was so flimsy that I mistook it for a piece of plastic. Sometimes we see something like that on the highway, we drive along quietly and nothing happens, but now it was made of metal, so the car had damage.

In general, the tests are going as the winter tests usually go, and this means that for the time being we do not understand the balance of power at all, so it is too early to say anything. We don’t know who has what amount of fuel in the tanks, but I can confirm that the handling of our new car is much better than that of last year’s SF-23.

A year ago, after winter testing, we didn’t even know which direction to work in, because the car behaved very unpredictably in corners: extremely strong oversteer or understeer. The new car isn’t like that, so the original photo is clearly better.

However, my first impression is that Red Bull is still leading the way and yesterday we saw them setting some great lap times. But these are just my personal impressions, and they don’t mean much because I haven’t analyzed any data yet.

Returning to our car, I will say that improved handling should help solve the problem of increased rubber degradation over long stretches of laps. Therefore, everything should go better over the race distance.”