Charles Leclerc hailed Friday in Australia as Ferrari’s best start to a weekend in the 2023 Formula 1 season so far.
After clocking the fifth fastest time in the first session, Leclerc then proceeded to post the second quickest effort before the rain halted further improvements in the second hour.
With Ferrari struggling to understand its troublesome SF-23 car during the early stages of the year, the Italian team continued to conduct tests during the dry stages of running.
Leclerc was buoyed by the improved feeling he felt inside the car compared to the first two races, with the Monegasque driver now targeting making the correct overnight changes to close the gap to Red Bull.
“I feel like the feeling is a bit better than the other races, so that is positive. It is probably our most positive FP2 of the season, which doesn’t mean much, but at least it is a Friday that finishes on a positive note,” Leclerc said.
“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 [during the race].
“In quali I think it will be close once again. In the race, unfortunately with the rain [in FP2], nobody did the high fuel runs, so on that we are going a little bit blind into the race. Maybe in FP3 we’ll see a bit more long runs and hopefully we’ll manage to learn a bit more there.”
While Leclerc was able to keep the Red Bull drivers honest in qualifying in both Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, Ferrari’s severe tyre degradation troubles meant he was unable to live with the blistering long-run pace of the dominant RB19 cars in either race.
However, the Ferrari racer is remaining hopeful that the changes that have been made for this weekend can improve its competitive form on Sunday.
“I think that with the different changes we’ve done today, maybe we [will] find a little bit of performance,” last year’s race winner added.
“We must not forget that last race, we were really, really struggling in the race and we won’t be finding this kind of lap time in the race, but this should be a step in the right direction.”
Carlos Sainz in the sister Ferrari improved upon a sixth-place finish in FP1 to log a time good enough to be classified inside the top five come the end of the day.
The Spanish driver subsequently shared Leclerc’s enthusiasm in adopting an upbeat feeling about the alterations made to the car.
“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,” he remarked.
“We did seem to understand a bit better and find a couple of things that could help us in the future, but until we don’t put it into practice in a proper quali lap, we will not know.”
But while Sainz is confident that Ferrari can mix it with Red Bull in qualifying tomorrow, he is expecting to endure the same race day struggles as a fortnight ago in Saudi Arabia.
“I think it’s fair to assume that in quali we will play with them, but then in the race we should assume also that we should be one step behind like we were in Jeddah, no?
“But with the steps that 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.”
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