This Friday seemed to be going really smoothly for Charles Leclerc. In front of his home crowd in Monaco, the Ferrari driver was really strong from the first practice session. In FP1 he didn’t use the softest tires and so he only reached the top of the results list in FP2. In the afternoon he got faster lap after lap. His best time of 1:11.278 wasn’t even the limit.
“If you look at my three sectors, there’s still a lot of lap time left if I get everything right,” said Leclerc, drawing a worrying conclusion for the rest of Formula 1. Because it’s true: He did set the fastest times in all three sectors during the second practice session, but on three different laps.
Leclerc drives Monaco training with more risk
If you add together Leclerc’s three best sectors from FP2, you get a lap time of 1:11.004. That would be a strong 0.462 seconds faster than the best time of his closest rival Lewis Hamilton. “We had problems getting everything right on the soft, there was a lot of traffic the whole time,” explains Leclerc.
Even on the fourth attempt with the same soft tyres, the Leclerc Ferrari still managed to improve its time. In fact, Leclerc drove his absolute fastest first sector in this attempt. Then he hit traffic and aborted the lap. So it is theoretically even conceivable that he could have broken the 1:11 mark on Friday.
“I have a lot of confidence in the car, but it’s important that we take this rhythm into the third practice session,” warns Leclerc. He has several problem areas in mind. First of all: “I took a bit more risk than the others, which paid off today, but it’s about qualifying tomorrow. Everyone is pushing themselves to the limit.” And there is an even bigger problem.
Does Ferrari have a setup problem? Gigantic gap between Leclerc and Sainz
Between the two Ferrari drivers Leclerc and There is a huge gap between Carlos Sainz and the car. The result clearly looks like a Sainz problem: The Spaniard was sixth, a whopping 0.684 seconds slower than Leclerc: “I just couldn’t get the maximum performance out of a lap, neither from the soft nor the medium.”
But that’s only half the story. “For some reason I felt incredibly fast in the long run,” Sainz wonders. On the medium, he was the fastest car in the field. Here, the internal pecking order at Ferrari was reversed. Leclerc spoke on the radio immediately after training of a tire disaster. His average lap on the medium was a whole second slower than Sainz’s.
Ferrari is not entirely clear about what happened here. Sainz blamed the changes during the lunch break: “We got a bit lost with these setup changes at the start of FP2. Then I was one step behind for the whole of FP2. Late in the long run I seemed to be catching up.”
Ferrari finds itself in a somewhat unusual situation. It has the fastest car on one lap and in race trim, but has not yet managed to combine the two elements. But we are talking about Monaco here. Overtaking is practically impossible. A strong qualifying car will be preferable.