Leclerc: Ferrari not as close to Mercedes as people think

Despite challenging for the lead in the opening grands prix of the season, Charles Leclerc says the gap between Mercedes and Ferrari is wider than it may seem

Setting aside the issue of whether the racing was artificial or not, the battles for the lead between the Ferrari and Mercedes drivers in the Australian and Chinese Grands Prix has created the impression that these two teams enjoy a healthy advantage over the rest of the field.

How close they are to each other is open to question, and Charles Leclerc has challenged the narrative that his Ferrari is fast enough to win grands prix on merit – despite those hotly contested opening laps and safety car restarts.

"For now, we are in an okay-ish place," he said in the FIA press conference ahead of the Japanese Grand Prix.

"But of course we're not here to only do podiums and we want to win races, which at the moment seems very difficult because Mercedes is at a very high level.

"I don't think it's as close as maybe people think."

Ferrari's SF-26 has a slightly different performance envelope to the Mercedes W17, which seems to have a slightly better mechanical balance and more downforce, enabling it to carry more speed into corners and harvest more energy in doing so. This, along with a highly effective straightline mode which enables the drivers to super clip earlier on long straights while suffering less of an overall speed penalty, translates into a laptime advantage even if the W17 doesn't always reach the same top speeds as some other Mercedes-engined cars.

Since Ferrari anticipated the turbo lag issues associated with the removal of the MGU-H from the hybrid power unit package, fitting a smaller turbo with less inertia, the SF-26 has better punch out of some corners and away from the starting line.

In China the Ferraris were left fighting each other after Mercedes gave them the slip.

Photo by: Andy Hone/ LAT Images via Getty Images

It's this which has enabled the Ferrari drivers to get in the mix at the start of the races so far. When cars are fighting for position, they cannot achieve what in engineering parlance is known as the "optimal lap" in terms of harvesting and deploying energy – because the drivers are triggering electrical boost elsewhere on the lap.

This is the reason for the so-called yo-yo racing seen in Melbourne and, to a lesser extent, in Shanghai, where the Turn 14 hairpin and the tightening-radius Turns 1-2-3 made driver bravery and finesse more of a factor. Once the Ferraris initially get ahead and are trading positions with the Mercedes they can stay in touch, but if outside influences break the connection they don't have the raw pace to catch up again.

The Australian Grand Prix was a prime example: when both Mercedes pitted under the early safety car and the Ferraris didn't, in effect it broke the string of the yo-yo.

"Obviously the first few races we see lots of fighting between the cars, which is actually quite nice, but as soon as you are a little bit suboptimal with these cars you lose a lot of lap time," said Leclerc.

"So, our only chance to stay with them is to annoy them in the first few laps, but as soon as they get free air then they've shown their real pace in the last races – and I think there's still these four or five tenths that we've seen throughout these first two races. So. it's still a significant advantage.

"But, yes, that doesn't discourage me and again we have some things in the pipeline. We've got to focus on ourselves, not trying to overdo it because it's never good in these situations, and then we'll see where that brings us."