Charles Leclerc is expecting Ferrari to “struggle this weekend” at the Austrian Grand Prix, with the Monegasque explaining the issues they faced on what he deemed as a “particularly difficult Friday” for the squad.
After being absent from Free Practice 1 – to allow for rookie Dino Beganovic to complete another outing in the SF-26 – Leclerc returned to action in second practice, where he ranked in P8 on the timesheets and recorded the highest lap count of the session on 35 tours.
However, while team mate Lewis Hamilton also racked up a good amount of mileage – as well as finishing fifth in both practice hours – the Scuderia did not appear to be quite on a par with Mercedes, with championship leader Kimi Antonelli topping each session.
“It’s not been an easy Friday I think, but not particularly from me,” Leclerc explained afterwards. “Yes of course I missed FP1 and that’s never ideal, but you can still recover from a few less laps in FP1.
“I think just as a team we don’t seem to be very competitive for now, so there’s a lot of work to be done on the car in order to make sure that we get back to a more reasonable place. But we’ll analyse and work very hard tonight, and hopefully tomorrow we can do a big step forward.”
Asked if he was surprised by the team’s struggles on Friday – given that they have appeared to be on an upward trajectory of late amid Hamilton’s victory last time out in Barcelona – Leclerc responded: “As we’ve said I think yesterday, the straights are quite a lot and we are losing so much time down the straights.
“I think maybe we are a bit negatively surprised by our performance in the corners at the moment, because in the corners normally we are competitive and we are not that competitive at the moment, so this is the part to fix.
“I don’t think we have a fix though for the straight-line speed, and for that reason I think we’ll struggle this weekend.
“It’s been a particularly difficult Friday for the team again, so I don’t think either Lewis or me are happy with the car at the moment. But yeah, we’ll work hard and hopefully tomorrow will be a better day.”
Team Principal Fred Vasseur echoed Leclerc’s sentiment, with the Frenchman conceding that the squad had faced a “tough Friday”.
“We struggled a little bit with the conditions, a bit extreme – the altitude, the temperature,” he explained. “It’s the same for everybody but it’s not fitting very well to us. It is like it is.
“We have the night to correct, to be ready for tomorrow, to put everything together. Let’s try to do a better job on Saturday.”
Quizzed on how much their power unit update is helping, Vasseur answered: “We knew about ADUO [Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities] two weeks ago or one week ago. You can’t expect to [take] a huge step forward. We put a new engine in and it’s another decent step.”
Vasseur went on to admit that Ferrari’s target for the remainder of the weekend is “to do our best”, adding: “As usual, we’ll see the outcome on Sunday evening but so far we are far away from our potential.
“It means that we have to work on ourselves, to be focused on ourselves [instead of] thinking about the others, and to try and put everything together.”
