Dejected Charles Leclerc appeals to Ferrari to fix the poor race pace at 2023 F1 Miami GP: "We need to find something now"

A dejected Charles Leclerc has implored Ferrari to find solutions to the strange characteristics of the car.

Ferrari appeared to have a very strong car in qualifying in Miami but the race pace was arguably the worst of the top four teams. Leclerc himself had a horrible race weekend.

He first messed up his qualifying on Saturday with a crash. To make matters worse, on Sunday (May 7), he was stuck in the midfield group and found it very hard to make his way through the field. He also complained about the inconsistent nature of the car which meant he was never able to make sustained progress.

In the end, Leclerc ended the race in P7, a couple of places behind Carlos Sainz.

Talking to Sky Sports F1 after the race, the Ferrari driver appealed to his team to find solutions to a car that is struggling to be competitive.

“We have been struggling all day. Very similar picture to the beginning of the year, we are competitive in qualifying, once we come to race day we are struggling like crazy,” Charles Leclerc said.

“The window of our car is so narrow and whenever you get a little bit out, it has huge consequences on the balance and it’s from one corner to the other, and even in one corner, sometimes you can have huge understeer, which goes to huge oversteer, and this is obviously not ideal to have confidence in the car.”

He added:

“Plus, I had a lot of bottoming today for some reason, which I don’t have the explanation yet. Just the consistency is what we are lacking at the moment and we’ll try and work for that.

“We need to find something now, we are struggling in the race since a little bit of time now, so we need to come up with solutions. Mercedes are quick, Aston Martin are really quick in the race, the Alpine didn’t look too bad in the race.

“I cannot add anything more than we have a lot of work to do and we need to find something.”

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We are in the middle of a learning process: Charles Leclerc's teammate Carlos Sainz

Charles Leclerc's teammate, meanwhile, was a bit more optimistic as he felt that the team was going through a learning process.

Carlos Sainz felt there were some solutions that the team needed to find. He also understands why the car that was very competitive on the medium tire struggled a lot on the hard tire.

Sainz said after the Miami GP:

“I think we are in the middle of a learning process.

“And this weekend will help us a lot to understand why, again, we can fight for pole yesterday, do a very good stint on medium [tyres] and push Fernando [Alonso] on the medium and suddenly put a hard on, do three or four laps pushing the tyre to try an undercut, and then this means that the next thing you’re going to finish 20 seconds behind a car that is…

“We were actually quicker on the medium.”

It was an overall shambolic weekend for Ferrari as Charles Leclerc crashed twice during the weekend and could not score as optimally as possible. They will be looking for a much better showing in the next race in less than two weeks time.