Ferrari are still struggling to wrap their heads around their wavering form and get to the bottom of why their recent upgrades have led to unreliable performances in recent races, with more headaches in Spa.
Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz were fourth and fifth at the end of FP2, but both were less than happy at being half a second slower than the two McLarens of Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri, and the red Bull of Max Verstappen.
“A difficult day to understand, running with various set ups and tyres, in different conditions and different tyres as well, so everybody was on a different plan,” Leclerc admitted when talking to the media in the paddock afterward.
“It’s been quite a few years now that it’s difficult to understand the picture on the Friday with those generation of cars, but today is even more so.
“Unfortunately we are just struggling,” he sighed. “Compared to McLaren especially, it’s a little bit everywhere.
“We’ve got to focus on ourselves, try to find the right compromise between tomorrow which will be probably wet and Sunday when it will be dry, but we are on it.
“We still have quite a lot of meetings to go through and hopefully we find the best compromise for tomorrow and Sunday,” he added. “We don’t yet have a clear picture.
“With the expectation of rain tomorrow and dry conditions on Sunday, we will work to find the best compromise to extract the maximum on both days. It’s our last race before the holidays so we’ll give it everything to finish on a high.”
Sainz suggested that resurfacing work on the 7km-long circuit – the longest on the current F1 calendar – was complicating matters for all the teams this weekend, including Ferrari.
“This year we found a very different track compared to previous years due to the new asphalt,” he said. “We had to adapt the car to these new conditions and bumps, but overall the new surface provides a lot more grip.”
He said that this element had contributed to a “very different start to what we’re used to” this week.
“We need to keep an eye out for tyre degradation. It makes the degradation more tricky and less controllable, so race simulation was an important part of our Friday programme,” he explained.
“I think it’s going to be giving us Formula 1 teams and drivers some headaches going into tonight,” he added. “Tomorrow we’ll try to focus on maximising the package we have and qualify as high up as possible.”
Like all the drivers, Sainz had half an eye on the weather forecasts heading into Saturday’s final practice and qualifying sessions.
“It looks like it’s going to be a wet qualifying, but at the same time it also said it was going to rain all day today and it didn’t.
“So we’re open-minded going into tomorrow. The weather here is always unpredictable, and we will just need to adapt to whatever comes.”
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