Charles Leclerc believes Ferrari is just lacking "raw performance" in its F1 car compared to rivals, but is good at hitting the ground running at grands prix.
Ferrari's mid-season optimism about launching a title challenge in 2026 has faded, with the team not winning a grand prix since Leclerc's success in July's British Grand Prix.
Although the chassis is regarded as one of the strongest on the grid, the power unit is lacking behind the Mercedes and Red Bull designs, with a fresh design introduced at the Italian Grand Prix to combat the size of the turbo.
Ferrari opted for a smaller turbo to eliminate lag and produce excellent drivability, especially at slow speed, but at the cost of top-end straight-line speed.
The Scuderia has also had a trait of starting strongly in practice sessions before falling back when the engines are turned up - something Leclerc has also noticed.
"I'm not sure we are particularly good on Fridays," Leclerc began to tell media, including RacingNews365, about Ferrari's propensity to hit the ground running.
"I mean we are, but I believe it comes more from the engine modes that others are running, and once we come to qualifying, they just have something that we don't.
"In FP1, maybe we are slightly more competitive in comparison to our competitors that have something more for qualifying that we don't have at the moment.
"But one of our strengths as a team is straight from the get-go having a car with a good balance.
"I think our car is quite peaky, but I think we do a very good preparation before the weekend on the simulator. The correlation has been quite strong recently, which helps us to do the work on the simulator back at home, and then arrive at the track and have a strong car straight away and a car I feel comfortable with.
"So, I think it's more down to the preparation. It's not that if we design a very peaky car, then we can extract more out of it. The raw potential of the car is not at the level of our main competitors, but I don't think making it more peaky will be able to extract anything more.
"I think it's just the raw performance of the car where we are a bit down at the moment."
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