Charles Leclerc has dispelled suggestions that the new Ferrari is struggling with porpoising, the issue that dominated the early stages of last season.
It's the phenomenon where the car briefly loses its aerodynamic downforce seal with the track surface, causing it to 'pop up' and impairing speed and handling.
Many teams battled to solve the problem in 2022 with Mercedes particularly badly affected. And footage of the SF-23 visibly bouncing on the track at Bahrain this week raised fears that the new Ferrari might be suffering a relapse.
However Leclerc insisted that was not the case, having completed 68 laps on Friday afternoon after team mate Carlos Sainz notched up 70 laps before the midday break.
"I don’t think we are particularly worried with that," Leclerc replied when asked if he'd been suffering from porpoising at any point, saying that any bouncing was likely down to the team trying out extreme set-ups.
"We ran various tests today, with our main focus on the car’s set-up. We are working hard and it’s still too early to make any judgement yet.
"I think the first day was mostly for that," he suggested. "To try and do different directions on a bigger scale than what we will do in a [race] weekend, which is what the test is for.
“We had a positive first day and now more days will go on, more laps we’ll do, we’ll go into the details and fine-tune it. It is not a concern right now.”
He added that so far everything matches the team's expectations, "which is a good sign – so this is positive."
"This had to be done, just to see whether everything matches. Luckily, everything matches," he said, adding that Friday had been about "trying to extract a bit more performance by trying to be a bit more at ease with the car."
"We will keep pushing forward by analysing our data ahead of the last day of testing tomorrow," he said in summary.
On the other side of the garage, Sainz was also sounding similarly satisfied with the test runs so far.
“Smooth, very smooth to be honest,” hew commented on Friday. “Quite happy with how we’ve been able to run with the quantity of tests we’ve managed to do over the first few days.
"Reliability was again very good and we've been able to explore all the set-ups we targeted to test," he noted.
"Exploring the limits of the set-up, trying to put the car in different places and learning a lot from it, which is a target that I had from last year and couldn’t do and so far I’m managing to do it.
"We keep exploring the limits of the car and finding potential areas where we can maximise performance. The main target is to keep up the good work tomorrow and get ready for next week."
Sainz said that the SF-23 felt similar to its predecessor. "It feels like an evolution of last year, it feels honestly very similar to drive.
"There haven’t been major changes going on in the car or the concept, so [it's about] trying to improve the good base that we had last year, and obviously now putting our focus on the weaknesses of last year.”
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