02/08/2020
NEWS STORY
Ferrari is to hold a 'filming day' at Silverstone ahead of next weekend's 70th Anniversary Grand Prix.
Teams are allowed two filming days a season, the purpose of which is ostensibly for promotional purposes.
While they are limited to just 100 kms on each of the days, they are allowed to use their current car, albeit fitted with demonstration tyres provided by Pirelli.
Ferrari used the first of its filming days in February, running the SF1000 at Barcelona ahead of pre-season testing.
With the team having had a troubled start to its season which has seen it lose ground to Mercedes and Red Bull and gradually fall into the midfield, the filming day will allow the Maranello outfit to try some of the upgrades it has yet to introduce.
A raft of upgrades was originally planned for the Hungarian Grand Prix, but such was the lack of performance in the season opener that a number of them were introduced in time for the Styrian Grand Prix.
While Charles Leclerc has admitted that the team is "struggling massively" for pace, teammate Sebastian Vettel has had a torrid time thus far this weekend.
After missing all of FP1 and much of FP2, things didn't get much better yesterday, the German qualifying tenth for today's race.
"Tomorrow we'll be on the wrong tyres at the end of the queue, at the end of the top ten, so it won't be a piece of cake," he subsequently told Sky Sports.
"Obviously the last two days haven't been good," he continued, "and therefore we lost a little bit of momentum. I thought that other than that, the first weekend was trouble, the second weekend didn't really happen. The third weekend was sort of the first smooth weekend and now we're in trouble again. So it's been a bit of a rough start, but you know, there's not much choice.
"I'm determined to hang in there. I think the guys are pushing as much as they can. I don't think there's any bad intentions by anyone. So we obviously had some issues yesterday and this morning, but we have to, I guess, at this stage pull through and we'll come out on the other side."
In terms of "bad intentions" amidst speculation that the team has basically 'given up' on the German, he subsequently told Channel 4: "I don't want to accuse anyone of bad intentions... but from my side it was not ideal today.
"I had a lot of trouble finding the rhythm," he admitted. "As I said, I am relatively confident that tomorrow will be better. How much I don't know. I can't promise anything, but it can't get much worse."
Asked what had gone wrong in qualifying, he said: "The honest answer is I don't know. I mean, I struggled a little bit to get into the groove and into the rhythm, which around here is important.
"Yesterday, we didn't get much running, not many quality laps, and this morning, we had another small issue. So yeah, not ideal, but equally, I thought the car was okay.
"I struggled to put it together. So I think it's probably more me just making sure everything comes together. So not a good session, but let's see what we can do tomorrow."
Check out our Race Day gallery from Silverstone, here.