Leclerc: Ferrari must understand 'crazy' Red Bull race pace

Charles Leclerc says Ferrari must try to understand the "crazy" race pace difference between its car and Red Bull's RB19, noting that the latter's performance was "on another planet" in Bahrain.

A relatively tight qualifying session on Saturday saw Leclerc clock in third behind both Red Bull's and 0.292s adrift from poleman Max Verstappen, while Carlos Sainz was fourth in the pecking order.

But on race day, the performance gap between Verstappen and Leclerc was as high as one second a lap, despite the Monegasque running ahead of Sergio Perez before his demise on lap 40 due to a power unit issue.

After the race, Leclerc admitted that the magnitude of Ferrari's deficit to Red Bull in race trim required some serious analysis on the part of the Italian outfit.

"It's not good enough," said Leclerc. "We are far from Red Bull, so we need to push and understand what did they find during this break because they are on another planet on race pace.

"I mean, for now, we don't know. We are fast in qualifying, but we are not fast in the race, and it's not by a little. So I think Red Bull found something big somewhere, and we need to find that.

"It is very difficult to understand because obviously, the car from quali to race is not changing at all.

"But for some reason on one lap we are very close to them, and in the race we are a second away in some parts of the race. It's crazy, the difference, so we need to look into it."

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Further aggravating Ferrari's plight on race day was the tyre degradation generated by its SF-23 while Red Bull had no similar issues to report.

But Leclerc reckoned that its car's tyre deg was mainly a consequence of its drivers having to push harder to keep up with its rival.

"I think we are just slow," he said. "The tyre degradation may be a little bit, but eventually we just lack performance.

"We need to push more in order to extract the performance out of the car so then the degradation comes up. We need to look into it because for now we are really far from the winning race pace.

"I think it's very difficult to separate deg and performance. I think eventually we are just too slow in the race, and because we are too slow we are pushing a lot, and we are destroying the tyres, because we are slow.

"Red Bull seems to have so much more performance than we do in the race so they can manage in the first few laps, and then they start to push, and so that deg is much better."

Leclerc had approached last weekend's race with a small strategic advantage, having set aside a set of new soft tyres for his first stint that gave him an edge over Perez which, for the Monegasque, was the only positive to take away from the weekend.

"The only positive we can take away from the weekend is that we did the right choice in qualifying by keeping those new softs," he said.

"We had a good start, but that is definitely not enough to make me happy after what happened.

"We were in second place for quite a few laps, which honestly was the best we could hope for.

"Then we got passed by Checo which was just a matter of time, they are in a league of their own this weekend in terms of speed, so we couldn't really challenge them.

"All of that doesn't matter, as we need to finish the race.

"It was all about trying to manage the pace, manage the gap with the guys behind, which I was doing, not really pushing massively, but anyway there wasn't time enough in the car to be able to challenge Red Bull.

"So third was the right position, but unfortunately, we didn't finish the race."

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