Charles Leclerc says Ferrari has made genuine progress with updates to its 2024 Formula 1 car, although the side-effect of bouncing has severely masked the improvements to the SF-24.
When Ferrari introduced a new floor to the Spanish Grand Prix, the change in aerodynamic properties of the floor appeared to exacerbate an already-present level of bouncing in the car. This has been at its worst in the higher-speed corners, inducing unpredictability.
Ferrari reverted to the Imola-spec floor for the British Grand Prix to control the level of bouncing around the plethora of medium-high speed corners, and since had introduced a revised underbody for Hungary and Belgium to iron out those issues further.
Leclerc said that, although the outright numbers produced by the aero upgrades earlier in the year were as expected, the bouncing issues meant that these could not be fully reflected in the team's performances.
"From Spain onwards, I think this was more the turning point where we brought something on the car, which the numbers, as I've always said, were there," Leclerc explained in an exclusive interview with Motorsport.com.
"However, it induced quite a lot of bouncing that we've been struggling with. And on my side, specifically, I went very aggressive in the last four races with set-up, especially, trying to find solutions for that.
"I've always been [aiming] to go for the last hundredths, and I think this is the approach that pays off whenever things are as they should be.
"Whenever you have a car, that is bouncing, by example, you cannot go too close to the limit because the car is doing more unpredictable things, and you've got to keep more margin.
"Which is something that I know I'm a bit... yes, it's not my approach, and so always, I'm going to pay a little bit more of the price whenever these things happen.
"However, I don't think that this was the main issue in the last few races. It was more about putting the car in very extreme places in order to get something out of it and to understand and that was the main reason of the lack of performance of the last few races.
"I will put that mostly on bouncing. The bouncing is what created the inconsistencies that we have seen in the last few races, and made us struggle a bit more than before that."
Leclerc drew parallels to Ferrari's progress last season, where it elected not to prioritise results to ensure that it had a stronger run-in at the end of the season.
This led to a phase of experimentation at Zandvoort where Ferrari made a breakthrough with a new floor, leading into a successful second half of the year.
"I remember last year we had two races like that, and it started in Zandvoort where we decided, okay, maybe Zandvoort is not going to be the race for us, but we want to learn as much as possible in order to get better after that," he said.
"And I'm sure that this is the same process we have gone through in the last three, four races. However, the negative point about it is that we've lost three, four races instead of two last year.
"But I believe that that gave us a much deeper understanding of what was happening, and I'm confident to say that we've learned a lot."
