Carlos Sainz concedes he’s still not “100% at home with his Ferrari car despite ending FP2 for the Canadian Grand Prix in third place.
After the first hour saw very limited track action due to a CCTV issue at the circuit, both Ferraris ended the second session – extended to 90 minutes – inside the top five.
Despite wounding up third, two positions above team-mate Charles Leclerc, Sainz admits he was enduring troubles with braking in his SF-23 on Friday.
However, the Spaniard is confident that the team have now understood the problem ahead of the remainder of the race weekend.
“For us, with the extra half an hour of the session in FP2 we managed to catch up quite a lot on the run plan and on the driving, but not having that hour of running and the two hours between sessions to learn about the car and do a few set-up changes it’s a limitation, but we had a decent Friday.
“I’m still not feeling 100% at home with the car and I was struggling quite a bit with the braking today, but we’ve started to understand why now and we’ll try to make some changes for tomorrow.”
With the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve featuring multiple heavy braking zones – most notably at the end of the back straight into the Turn 13/14 chicane – Sainz has stressed the importance of solving the issues he encountered in second practice.
“It is the most important thing here and I feel that today we didn’t get it right,” he addressed. “We have a couple of settings to try and do better for tomorrow and I’m sure we’ll be more competitive.”
Sainz’s best effort was only one-tenth adrift of the Mercedes pairing, who locked out the top two positions to conclude Friday.
While Leclerc was buoyed by the feeling he enjoyed in the cockpit, Sainz again professed the difficulties he had to go through to extract a competitive lap time.
“It looked quick but it wasn’t easy,” he added. “It was jumping around a lot over the kerbs and bumps – I think you could tell it from the images – but at least the pace and the performance was there but it was not an easy lap.”
Nevertheless, with the closing stages interrupted by showers and the prospect of rain on Saturday looking increasingly likely, Sainz asserts Ferrari must ensure it avoids any potential mishaps in qualifying.
“We just need to make sure we nail all the sessions from now on,” he said.
“It will be tricky with the tyres, here between the extremes, the inters and the slicks, the track dries up really quickly, so I think it’s going to be a challenging day tomorrow and making no mistakes and get into it.”
