(Motorsport-Total.com) – How much did the big Ferrari update in Monza help Charles Leclerc to win at his home race in Italy? The Scuderia 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.
Ferrari was able to outwit McLaren in Monza Zoom
Changes were also made to the diffuser, sidepod and rear-view mirror. On Saturday, Ferrari qualified in fourth and fifth place, and on Sunday Leclerc surprisingly took the win ahead of the higher-rated McLaren.
Carlos Sainz is “not sure, to be honest,” whether the underbody also played a major role or whether Ferrari simply benefits from the low downforce configuration. He says: “We need more samples of the new underbody and we need to get to more normal race tracks.”
Monza is an outlier with its long straights and special low-downforce packages, and the upcoming street circuits in Baku and Singapore are also of a rather special nature. “I guess the next normal race is Austin,” says Sainz. That will tell us how good we are with the new underbody.”
Team boss Frederic Vasseur also stresses that it is difficult to really understand the impact of the upgrade on a track like Monza – simply because the cars are completely different compared to the rest of the season.
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But the Frenchman also says: “When you have six cars in qualifying within a tenth of a second (second to sixth place were within 0.077 seconds; editor’s note), every little bit makes a difference. And if it means a hundredth of a second, then I’ll take it.”
But he admits that the new underbody probably played a minor role in winning the race. “You can certainly say that the upgrade is important, but at the end of the day the pace was more to do with the 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.”
