Charles Leclerc was the king of qualifying in the 2022 season – but the Monegasque is not so confident about his chances of pole position this weekend.
Ferrari will expect to be the main challengers to Red Bull this year, especially after how their title charge collapsed in 2022. New chief Frederic Vasseur knows he will be expected to lead a more sustained threat than his predecessor Mattia Binotto managed.
it looks as though they will be podium contenders for this weekend's Bahrain Grand Prix. But Leclerc is not convinced the SF-23 has the one lap pace to mount a serious challenge for pole position in qualifying on Saturday.
"I don't think we have the performance maybe for pole," he told F1 TV. "But we can be in the mix. Whenever we have races that are a bit more difficult, we should be there and trying to take every opportunity, so that's what we'll try to do this weekend.
"It's still early days. I maybe think that Aston Martin is a bit quicker than they will be tomorrow. But let's wait and see. We don't know, it's just what I think."
As for the potential race pace of the SF-23, Leclerc expressed his belief that there is "work to do" on that front. He added: "It is very difficult to know what the others are running. We know what we are running and there is a bit of margin, but we need to wait and see for Sunday."
On a more positive note, he did seem happier with the car than he had been during pre-season testing. His Ferrari was much more tame than it had been last week, when the team purposely ran with a setup which gave the car a lot of understeer.
Leclerc said: "Let's say that the feeling is better than testing. On my side in testing, it's been very inconsistent in the way we run the car because we were testing a lot of things, so I didn't have much time with the car to my liking. I did today."
Carlos Sainz offered an opposing view, and said: "Simply the car is not exactly responding, as I expect or as it did in testing. I'm struggling a bit more with the balance. It's a bit more out of place compared to where it was. But we're having a good look at it. We expect to put it back together for tomorrow."
