21/07/2023
NEWS STORY
Scuderia Ferrari had a reasonably productive day at the Hungaroring, considering that the first free practice session was not very useful, because of two red flag periods and the fact that rain hit the track after the first 20 minutes.
In the second hour, Charles was quickest overall, with Carlos tenth, the latter partly down to traffic costing him some time.
Leclerc and Sainz only did a handful of laps on Intermediate tyres in the first session. Charles was seventh, while Carlos did not set a time, after spinning off at turn 3, the only damage being to the front wing, which cost him about ten minutes of track time. Much of the work was therefore carried over to the second hour, which fortunately was run entirely in the dry. Leclerc and Sainz did low fuel runs on both the Medium and Soft tyres, setting their best times on the latter compound. Charles was quickest in 1'17"686, while Carlos stopped the clocks in 1'18"182. For the final third of the session they both focussed on set-up work, which will need to be completed, especially in Carlos' case, in tomorrow's final hour of free practice starting at 12.30 local time.
Tomorrow's qualifying features the first roll-out of a new format in which drivers have to use just one tyre compound per session: there will be plenty of traffic in Q1, as all cars must run the Hards and presumably carry enough fuel to do several laps; in Q2 Mediums must be used, with the fastest Softs only being allowed in Q3. The session starts at 16 local.
Charles Leclerc: It was a good day overall, although it is still difficult to read into the other teams' performance as everyone is running different programmes in light of the new format. We did everything we planned to do and the feeling in the car was pretty good so let's see what we can do tomorrow.
Carlos Sainz: It was a strange Friday: FP1 was affected by the rain and in FP2 we had to work taking into account the new format we will run this weekend. In the short run I had quite a bit of traffic with the high fuel runners while in the long run I felt a bit better even if we didn't do too many laps. Overall there is margin to improve ahead of tomorrow so we'll get on with it straight away.
Check out our Friday gallery from the Hungaroring here.