Ferrari happy with trouble-free three days: 'Too early to say anything'

Ferrari finished fourth and fifth with Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz during the final day of testing in Bahrain, but Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas drove their faster times at a more favourable time in terms of weather as well as with a compound softer. Red Bull still seems a bit faster than the formation from Maranello over one lap, but there is cautious optimism coming from Ferrari's garage. One is especially happy that it has not encountered any major problems.

"We have three very intensive days of testing behind us," Leclerc interjects in the press release. "The first day was all about running big scans and trying to understand how well our data matches what we predicted at the factory. What we learned is that there is quite a good correlation. We focused a lot on set-up work this week and made some good steps forward."

The runner-up in last year's world championship tried out different driving styles in the day-and-a-half he spent in the new SF23. "I also tried out some different driving styles to test what suits me best in this new car.We’ll be back next week for the opening race of the season and it will be interesting to see where all teams stand in relation to their closest competitors."

Sainz and Vasseur happy

Teammate Carlos Sainz is happy that major problems were spared Ferrari. "We finished the test without any issues and completed the full run plan that we had for these three days. So first of all, thank you very much to the entire team here and in Maranello. Today we focused on both short and long runs to finish the assessment of some of the parameters that we wanted to test. Now we will focus on analysing the data, in order to arrive at the first GP of the year as well prepared as possible."

Frederic Vasseur is also satisfied with what he has seen from the 2023 car over the past three days. "It has been three intense days of work for everyone in the team. We have scanned a number of items on the car and ticked many of the boxes of our programme, without worrying about lap times or what the others have been doing, simply focusing on ourselves."

"The main target was getting as much mileage under our belt as possible and we did that, although it’s also true that you always want to do more and have more time. But it’s the same for everyone. Whenever we managed to put everything together the performance seemed to be there, but we are clearly still in the process of getting to know the car so it’s too early to say anything," the Mattia Binotto replacement concluded.