First time out on track for the new season this Friday in Bahrain for Formula 1, here where just one week ago Aston had caught the eyes of the top teams.
The AMR23 had already shown quite a good pace that translated into a rather impressive performance during both Free Practice sessions, as Fernando Alonso went second in FP1 and closed the day at the top of the timesheet ahead of two-time-world-champion Max Verstappen.
Behind the other Red Bull of Sergio Perez was Charles Leclerc, who appeared to be much more comfortable in his Ferrari compared to the first runs of pre-season testing.
There the aim for the Scuderia was to collect as much data as possible in order to have a better understanding of the SF-23, instead of concentrating on finding the best setup for performance.
With a more balanced setup the Monegasque closed FP2 in 4th position, his fastest time – 1.31,367s – was 0.46s off Alonso’s best lap.
“I don’t think we have the performance maybe for pole,” Leclerc told F1 TV at the end of the session.
“It’s still early days. I maybe think that Aston is a bit quicker than they will be tomorrow. We don’t know, it’s just what I think.”
Finding a better race pace will take quite a bit of effort from Ferrari, as Leclerc believes“there’s a bit of margin” to improve, but “most work to do” still.
“Let’s say that the feeling is better than testing,” when he experienced a lot of understeering.
“On my side in testing, it’s been very inconsistent in the way we run the car because we were testing a lot of things, so I didn’t have much time with the car to my liking. I did today.”
Opposite feeling that of his teammate Carlos Sainz, who seemed more satisfied with the SF-23 during testing.
“Simply the car is not exactly responding as I expect or as it did in testing,” he explained.
“I’m struggling a bit more with the balance. It’s a bit more out of place compared to where it was, but we’re having a good look at it. We expect to put it back together for tomorrow.”
A friday to forget for the Spaniard, as his best time was a P14 in FP2, after a spin that had him drop back to the bottom of the order in the first Free Practice session.
“We were just testing some things in the car, trying to finalise a few things that we wanted to try in FP1,” he explained.
“We were scrubbing the medium tyres, which we wanted to get rid of in FP1, to use the softs in the night session.”
A spin at Turn 9 that came shortly after the team was forced to change the rear-wing spec of his Ferrari as the centre strut was shaking too much.
“It didn’t go to plan, clearly. It wasn’t intentional, it was a test that went wrong and we came back for FP2,” he recounted.
“I lost a bit of track time, I lost a bit of freedom and probably paid the price in FP2. Still, the car doesn’t feel the same as it did in testing.”
Photo credit: Scuderia Ferrari
