Looking at the results alone, Ferrari today faced one of the most difficult days of the year. In Zandvoort all the riders employed by the Prancing Horse – the two starters plus Robert Shwartzman in Free Practice 1 – failed to enter the Top 10 in the first two practice sessions of the Dutch Grand Prix.
The gaps from the reference times of the sessions are not large, but only because Zandvoort is the second shortest track in the 2023 Formula 1 World Championship. Therefore, the gaps must be related to the length of the track to be interpreted correctly.
At the end of the second free practice session, Frédéric Vasseur, team principal of the Scuderia di Maranello, gave himself over to the microphones of Sky Sport F1 to take stock of the work done by his team today. Despite what the stopwatch said, trust within the team is much higher.
“I think the situation was complicated today. We tested various things in the morning and also in the afternoon on the single-seater. This means that we focused more on this than on pure performance. There were 10 cars in just a few tenths, and this means that we will have to put everything together for tomorrow. We have made a good step forward as regards the approach to the weekend and we are quite confident.”
“Today’s limits are related to putting everything together to do a good lap. There was an important difference between the two drivers from corner to corner. We saw Hamilton who is 3 tenths faster than us, but he is just a curve. So we have to take it slowly to understand the situation and optimize things, we’re not far off. We have room for improvement.”
Carlos Sainz, Ferrari SF-23
Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images
Ferrari devoted itself completely to evaluating different amounts of downforce on the rear wing. He did this in the morning with Shwartzman and Charles Leclerc, but also in the afternoon with Carlos Sainz Jr. who returned to the owner of his SF-23 in the afternoon session.
“Today we rode with less downforce than our rivals because that was one of the things we had to test. We don’t have test days during the year. We have the simulator, the wind tunnel, but the only time we can test is on Friday. So we tried to cover all aspects of the winger to get a complete picture of how it can go. We did it with both Shwartzman and Leclerc. Everything went according to plan.”
The race pace, as well as the flying lap, weren’t brilliant from the Ferraris. Vasseur, on the other hand, thinks the pace of the Reds hasn’t been bad at all. Then the work that will be done during the night should help Ferrari to get back in contention for important points again this weekend.
“The race pace was good today, but it’s more a question that we were missing 2 tenths on the qualifying simulation. We had this situation throughout the session. That’s why we’re not worried about the situation.”
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