Ferrari had a new underbody on the grid at Monza, but did it really play a part in Charles Leclerc’s victory?
How much did the big Ferrari update at Monza help carry Charles Leclerc to victory at his home race in Italy? The Scuderia had brought an extensive upgrade package to the track in Monza and, among other things, had a completely new underbody on the car because the other one had caused problems
Changes were also made to the diffuser, sidepod and rear-view mirror. On Saturday, Ferrari finished fourth and fifth in qualifying, and on Sunday Leclerc surprisingly drove to victory ahead of the more highly rated McLaren.
Carlos Sainz is “not sure, to be honest” whether the underbody also played a major role in this or whether Ferrari simply benefited from the low-downforce configuration. He says: “We need more samples of the new underbody and we need to get onto more normal race tracks.”
Monza, with its long straights and special low-downforce packages, is an outlier, and the upcoming street circuits in Baku and Singapore are also rather special in nature. “I guess the next normal race is Austin,” says Sainz. That will tell us how good we are with the new underbody.”
Team Principal Frederic Vasseur also emphasizes that it is difficult to really understand the effects of the upgrade on a track like Monza – simply because the cars are completely different compared to the rest of the season.
But the Frenchman also says: “When you have six cars within a tenth of each other in qualifying, every little bit makes a difference. And if it makes a hundredth of a second, then I’ll take it.”
However, he admits that the new underbody probably played a subordinate role in winning the race. “You can certainly say that the upgrade is important, at the end of the day the pace was more to do with tire management than anything else.”
“But it’s qualifying, where you have six or eight cars within a tenth or two, where every single upgrade pays off. “