29/11/2024
NEWS STORY
Scuderia Ferrari HP's Carlos Sainz will start tomorrow's Sprint race from the second row, while team-mate Charles Leclerc will be on row 3.
Sprint Qualifying took place in the desert night at Lusail, a track that was not expected to suit the SF-24. In fact, both drivers suffered with understeer and had to settle for the fourth and fifth fastest times, which is not ideal. Tomorrow's 19 lap, 100 kilometre race gets underway at 17 local (15 CET) and will provide the teams with all the necessary data to prepare for Sunday's race.
Having made it through the first two phases without any difficulty running the obligatory Medium tyre, in the final part, Carlos and Charles went out on Softs, with enough fuel to do two flying laps. On his first attempt Leclerc posted a 1'21"705, but Carlos was off the pace. However, on his second lap, the Spaniard set the fourth fastest time in 1'21"281 and Charles was just 27 thousandths slower, having to settle for fifth in 1'21"308.
Apart from assigning a maximum of 15 points, tomorrow's Sprint race will enable all the teams to evaluate their cars' behaviour in race trim. It's expected that most drivers will opt for the Medium tyre which today, Carlos and Charles only ran to scrub them in. From the little that could be seen from the partial long runs completed today, the SF-24's pace was not bad. That might allow the drivers to make up some places, even if the Lusail track is not exactly well known for its overtaking opportunities. After the race, there are three hours to prepare for the Grand Prix qualifying, which gets underway at 21.00 (19.00 CET).
Carlos Sainz: A rather unusual qualifying session. In terms of balance, we worked in the right direction and the car improved from free practice. However, in SQ3 I had quite a lot of understeer which obviously didn't help to put together a better lap.
Anyway, starting on the second row can still allow us to bring home a good result and hopefully, to try and attack one of the McLarens ahead, score points and collect data which will help us prepare for Sunday.
Charles Leclerc: Our FP1 performance was better than expected, so our hopes were that we could finish SQ in good positions, given that this weekend is such an important one for us. Unfortunately, we didn't and P4 and 5 is all that was possible today.
Let's see what tomorrow brings. For now we are not in the best positions, but things can play out differently come the Sprint race.
Fred Vasseur: We had a much better car in FP this afternoon, but we had too much understeer in SQ3 which meant we struggled a lot. If we want to look on the positive side, we can say that the big points are only given out on Sunday so we have to react and be ready for tomorrow evening's qualifying and make sure we have a good car for Sunday.
Now the cars are in parc fermé until after the Sprint Race, but following that we will be able to make changes for the main Qualifying session.
Pace-wise it's quite difficult to have a real picture, as no one did a really long stint in practice so we cannot be sure what level of graining we will have. The Sprint race will be a bit earlier in the day so the track temperature will be higher and there should be less graining.
Check out our Friday gallery from Qatar here.