Ferrari is staying cautious about its race pace for the FIA World Endurance Championship 1000 Miles of Sebring, with driver Alessandro Pier Guidi advising — prior to qualifying — that Ferrari, making its debut in the Hypercar class with the 499P, may be missing some speed compared to Toyota.
However, shortly after MotorsportWeek.com spoke to Pier Guidi outside the Ferrari garage, his teammate Antonio Fuoco in the sister #50 Ferrari took pole, stunning race fans, media, other teams, and maybe even the team themselves.
When asked about how the car is performing, Pier Guidi responded positively. “I think we are quite okay. Maybe we miss a bit of speed compared to Toyota, but they have much more experience than us,” the Italian told MotorsportWeek.com.
However, he also cautioned that there’s still more performance to extract from the 499P. “We still didn’t get all the performance from our car — it’s still brand new. So we should work a bit more about that. But we are not bad.”
However, Pier Guidi also said — again, before Fuoco took pole ahead of Toyota — that maybe they were still missing single lap pace, compared to race pace. “We’re still missing something, there’s a bit of time to work as well. I think we’re missing the same performance over a single lap, than in race pace.”
With that in mind, we’ll have to wait and see how things shake out in the race, which starts at 12:00pm local time.
