Leclerc reveals the Ferrari weakness 'bigger than any other car on the grid'

Amidst a fairly disappointing year so far for Ferrari, highlighted by their P9 and P10 finishes at the British Grand Prix, Charles Leclerc has offered an explanation for their struggles ahead of the Hungarian Grand Prix.

The Italian outfit scored the least points out of their rivals last time out in the battle for P2 in the constructors' championship, including McLaren who found themselves on the podium after some impressive upgrades. 

Being an old airfield, Silverstone is notorious for its gusts and winds, which drivers up and down the grid battle with year upon year. Unfortunately for the Scuderia, this played into one of their SF-23’s main weaknesses, which they have been struggling to rectify since 2022.

"Wind conditions is a big thing, and for us, it has a big influence, and is probably bigger than any other car on the grid”, Leclerc told the media on Thursday.

"We just struggle with consistency in those situations - we did a big step forward at the end of the year as it was quite a bit worse.”

Ferrari have made efforts to counteract their wind sensitivity through tweaks and upgrades over the past year, but the unexpected flurries of Sunday’s race in Britain were too much for their current package: "It is going in the right direction, then, as we've seen in the last race at Silverstone, whenever the wind really picks up (as it did on Sunday), then we've got one of our main weaknesses.

"We understand where we are going to struggle - and unfortunately, Silverstone was one of those, we knew that it wasn't going to be a great weekend for us. Saturday went pretty well, considering what we expected, but then Sunday was worse than what we expected, but we know why.”

Vastly different in nature to Silverstone, the Hungaroring could play more to the strengths of Leclerc and co. this weekend, as the Monegasque is keeping the faith in his team to solve their windy matter: "I have no doubt that we will improve, then we need some time in order to the parts and for the engineers to find the best way to tackle the issue.

"We've already seen positive steps of going in that direction - we just need to keep pushing.

"On paper, [the Hungaroring] fits a little bit more our car, but again, every weekend, there seems to be a surprise by one or another team [in the battle behind Red Bull], so let's see.”