Carlos Sainz has confirmed Ferrari has made “small steps” with its troublesome SF-23 but not enough to propel it to victory in Sunday’s Australian Grand Prix.

Heading into the race weekend at Melbourne’s Albert Park, Sainz indicated the Scuderia was poised to alter the concept of its car as it is currently being “killed” by Red Bull.

Whilst Ferrari has delivered relatively strong one-lap pace that has allowed it to be in the mix for the front two rows on the grid, its race pace has been undermined by woefully poor tyre degradation.

In practice in Australia, Sainz and team-mate Charles Leclerc were sixth and fifth quickest respectively in FP1 before improving to fifth and second in the second hour-long session.

There are caveats in that FP1 was disrupted by a red flag for several minutes due to a GPS outage, whilst there was only 15 minutes of dry running in FP2 as rain affected the majority of the session.

The Spanish driver could at least see signs of improvement with the car compared to the opening two races in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

“Obviously practice is practice, but we did use that FP1 to try some very different things on the car to see if we can find a bit of performance for the package that we have now,” said Sainz.

“We did seem to understand a bit better and find a couple of things that could help us in the future, but until we put it into practice in a proper quali lap, we will not know.

“It’s little steps at the moment. Until the big upgrade comes we are trying to do small steps and pure optimisation with what we have which we know is not enough to fight for wins.”

Leclerc sees step in the right direction

As to where that will place Ferrari in the pecking order compared to frontrunners Red Bull, Sainz added: “I think it’s fair to assume that in quali we will play with them, but then in the race, we should assume we will be one step behind like we were in Jeddah.

“But with the steps we are planning to do, and that we want to do from the things that we’ve tried to discover this weekend, hopefully, that becomes a better situation.

“Enough maybe to get in the top three, top five, so we’ll focus on that and maximise what we have at the moment.”

Leclerc declared his FP2 to be the “most positive of the season” after finishing just over four-tenths of a second behind Fernando Alonso in his Aston Martin.

Leclerc appreciated that did not mean too much, but like Sainz, there was at least a small degree of optimism.

“We did quite a lot of scans in terms of set-up direction, and I feel like the feeling is a bit better than the other races,” said Leclerc.

“Now we need to work, do another step in the right direction tomorrow and hopefully we will be a bit closer to the Red Bulls tomorrow (in qualifying), and especially after tomorrow (for the race).

“But I think with the different changes we’ve done, maybe we will find a little bit of performance.

“We must not forget that in the last race, we were really, really struggling, and we won’t be finding this kind of lap time in the race (on Sunday).

“This should be a step in the right direction.”