What a difference a year makes. Dominant in every session twelve months ago and going on to take pole and the win, today Charles Leclerc and Sebastian Vettel will do well to scrape into the nether regions of Q3.

While the world and his dog cite the investigation into the Italian team's power unit as the root of its obvious struggle for pace, team boss, Mattia Binotto continues to blame the tyres.

"It didn't look too pleasant from the outside, certainly not from the inside as well," said the Italian following a tough opening day to the Spa weekend.

"We struggle to make the tyres work," he continued. "We are lacking grip, both in braking and acceleration which gives no overall performance to the car. So certainly the drivers are complaining about grip, overall grip," he explained.

"I think that's not the potential of our car," he added, "and that's certainly not the normal position for our car, if you compare where we are on the grid and the relative competitiveness to the others.

"There's a lot to analyse, to understand why we are not bringing the tyres to right window of temperature," he admitted. "I think it's the same situation on both cars, so it's not driver related. It's really the way we set up the car in order to find the right window on the tyres. If you don't find the right windows on the tyres, you are not making them work. Certainly if you don't have grip, you are not fast in sector two, and then you are slow in all three sectors as a consequence.

"So, there is a lot to do, and try to address it for the rest of the weekend."

"It's a surprise to be so far back, especially in FP2," admitted Charles Leclerc. "We've tried quite a lot of things... at the beginning, I tried something quite aggressive in downforce levels, but it didn't really work out. We came back on that.

"We are just lacking pace at the moment," he added, in a masterpiece of understatement. "We need to work hard to catch back, but I don't expect miracles for this weekend. It's doesn't feel good, and it's sad to see Ferrari so far down. As always, our work as drivers is to give our best, and that's exactly what I'm trying and what Seb is trying to do in the car."

Asked if the predicted rain might help his cause over the course of the weekend, he said: "We are struggling quite a lot with the balance this weekend, and normally in the rain, the balance only gets worse, and the issues you have in the dry are worse in the rain. So I think it's going to be difficult if we don't find any solution to fix the balance problems we have today."

"We're not quite where we should be," added Sebastian Vettel. "We're looking to find options with the set-up. We tried a lot this afternoon. Reset and try again, and try something different.

"I'm sure tomorrow will be a bit better. I'm not sure what the weather will be like, but yeah, we'll tackle it tomorrow."

Check out our Saturday gallery from Spa, here.