Ferrari arrived at the Shanghai International Circuit last year licking their wounds after they failed to extract the full potential from their car in a rain-hit season-opening Australian Grand Prix, and left Albert Park with just five points.
Fast forward to this year and the mood is significantly better. Charles Leclerc gave Ferrari a podium to kick off the year, with Lewis Hamilton racing very strongly to finish just behind in fourth.
While they couldn’t match pace-setters Mercedes, they appear at the very least the second-best team in the pecking order right now, which suggests boss Fred Vasseur’s call to cut development on its 2025 challenger in April last year to focus on 2026 may well have paid off.
As per La Gazzetta Ferrari on social media, the Monegasque replied: “No, absolutely not. The first race was on me: I changed the setup too much across the various FP sessions, looking for a balance I couldn’t find.”
“Now I’m happy with the car, and we have enough freedom to adapt it to our style.”
When asked if Ferrari can challenge Mercedes, Leclerc added: “I really hope so. In Qualifying, it’s going to take a lot of work in order to change the advantage that they have. Eight tenths in Melbourne was absolutely huge.
“There are things we are optimising that we haven’t optimised in Melbourne, so it will get better, but they still have a significant advantage. In the race [conditions], we are closer, so I hope that starting from this weekend we can put them under a bit more pressure.”
The seven-time world champion said: “I had a lot of fun last week.
“Also to have extra [pre-season] testing was fun for us, because it’s normally only a day-and-a-half in the car or something like that before the first race.”
Hamilton continued: “So, to get more running… then a lot discovered through the race from start to end. We knew that Mercedes were looking really strong, and little did we know it was as big a gap that we saw, but not an impossible gap to close.
“It’s just going to take all hands on deck, and I’m confident in my team doing absolutely everything back at the factory to try and close that gap.”