Ferrari a little faster Saturday than Friday: "That's positive"
F1 News
- GPblog.com
While Ferrari was very fast last year on the Spa-Francorchamps circuit, this year the team is not to be seen near the front. According to Ferrari, the cause of this has not yet been discovered.
It is a painful statistic for Ferrari: where every other team was faster during FP2 compared to last year's Belgian track, the team from Maranello was no less than 1.3 seconds slower. There was even a fear that Charles Leclerc and Sebastian Vettel would not make it to Q2 in qualifying.
That disaster was avoided, but not with a big margin. "We made some progress compared to Friday, so qualifying went a little better than expected. I think that's positive," said Laurent Mekies, the sports director of Ferrari, to Motorsport-Total.com.
Problem solved, but not the cause
According to Mekies, the reason for the bad Friday was that the team didn't get the tyres at the right temperature. "That was a surprise and we tried everything we could to make the car handle the tires a little better and give the drivers more confidence in the car. That worked, but we haven't found the cause of the problem yet," the top man explains.
Mekies hopes the race will be better for Ferrari. "It's a different situation then. We are driving with a little more downforce than the competition, so maybe that will help us. Especially if the weather isn't great." However, the sports director knows that it is a disastrous year for the team. "We know there is not much we can do about it in the short term and the road we are currently on is not good for our car", concludes the Frenchman.