Ferrari team engineer Jock Clear pinpoints gains on tyre management and engine power. Jock Clear on tyre management and engine power.

Despite the close battle in the qualifying session for the 2023 Formula 1 Bahrain Grand Prix, world champions Red Bull still swept the front row at the Sakhir circuit: as a result, Max Verstappen will start today’s race from pole position, just ahead of his team-mate Sergio Perez. Scuderia Ferrari have secured the second row for the first round of the 2023 Formula 1 campaign, with Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz who will begin the race in third and fourth.

Many believed that the Maranello team’s main target for this first round would be to focus on defending its position against the attack of Aston Martin and Mercedes, who seemed a bit ahead in terms of race pace. However, Ferrari Formula 1 team engineer Jock Clear is confident the Italian side can also think of challenging Red Bull for the race win.

Aware that it has to try something different to compensate for the lack of pace, Ferrari saved one set of new Pirelli soft tyres for Charles Leclerc in the final stages of Q3. The Monegasque therefore missed out on the chance to take pole position or at least a front row start, but should have more options in terms of strategy for today’s race.

Jock Clear, whose official job title is driving coach for Charles Leclerc, feels the Maranello team can be more competitive than many assessed based on the data from the pre-season testing session last week and from the first three free practice sessions at the Bahrain International Circuit:

“We do believe that around here at the moment, Red Bull really have a bit of a margin from the rest of the pack. I think had Charles run again yesterday, maybe he could have sniffed it. But I think we were comfortable with our decision. So we’re maybe closer to them than people think. I think today we’re quite happy to take the race to them, I don’t think we’re looking over our shoulder and just trying to stay in third place. We’re going to be having a go at Perez, and if we can take on Perez in the first stint, then I think we can hound Max for the rest of the race. I think we can make a race of it. So where have they got an advantage on us? Well, they’ve got a tenth and a half in qualifying. That’s all we know at the moment, but in the race, I think we can take the race to them.” – the 59-year old English senior performance engineer explained.

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One key major issues for Scuderia Ferrari last season was the tyre degradation on the F1-75 car. As a result, the Italian side has focused a lot of its development work during the sinter on solving this problem. At the same time, Jock Clear pointed out this issue was exacerbated by the fact that Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz were forced to push so hard in order to try and match the pace of a constantly improving Red Bull RB18 challenger, which made significant gains as a result of a weight reduction process.

“We worked a lot last year on our tyre management. Certainly at the end of the year, I think we’d made some very good progress. We’ve worked again on that over the winter, and in the three days of testing last week. So hopefully we can manifest that today with actually challenging Red Bull over the race distance. We’ve seen yesterday that they’ve probably got a little bit of a margin on us on a qualifying lap. But I really believe this afternoon, when Charles gets a sniff for those Red Bulls, I think he and Carlos can take the fight to them. We’re not going into today thinking Red Bull are uncatchable. I think a week ago some of the media was suggesting maybe that it’s all over. I think as you’ve seen, we don’t believe it is at the moment. We’d like to show that this afternoon.” – the English senior performance engineer continued.

Jock Clear also confirmed that Scuderia Ferrari is not stronger in terms of straightline speed, a key aspect that should prove very important in the duel against Red Bull, Aston Martin and Mercedes:

“Early days, but we’re comfortable with the development we had on our engine side, I think we’ve done a good job. That probably contributes some of it. We cleaned up the car from a drag point of view, because that looked like last year something that they [Red Bull] were on top of. So we’ve tried to eat into that as well. Obviously you never know exactly where people’s straightline speed comes from, whether it comes from running more engine power, or running more drag, or less drag. We don’t want to be going into races feeling that the car behind us has got 6kph advantage, as we saw sometimes last year. So definitely a step forward.” – Jock Clear concluded, ahead of the 2023 Bahrain Grand Prix, which takes place later today.