F1 | Marko: “Ferrari impresses not with the flying lap, but with the pace”

Melbourne gave its verdicts on Friday. Of course, they can't be definitive, but at the time of writing it was Ferrari that showed its cards, declaring without too many doubts to be the fittest at the end of the first day on the track of the Australian Grand Prix.

Charles Leclerc set the fastest time in Free Practice 2 with an advantage of 380 thousandths over Max Verstappen. Almost 4 tenths. That is, a situation reversed compared to what we were able to appreciate in the first two outings of the season, where the Red Bull had on average a similar advantage over the Red.

At the end of the second free practice session at Albert Park, Helmut Marko tried to give a picture of what we saw on the track today. Ferrari didn't impress him on the flying lap, because he thought the SF-24s used a strong engine map, contrary to what the Red Bulls did.

What remained imprinted in the mind of the team consultant still managed by Christian Horner was the race pace shown by Leclerc.

“I believe that Ferrari used a high level of mapping in their qualifying simulation, while we didn't. That's why I don't consider our 3 tenths delay over them to be serious. But in the long runs they were impressive. For As far as we are concerned, our structure is not yet in place.”

This time, Marko knows that Red Bull will have to work hard to recover from the form shown by Ferrari in Australia. The margin seen in Jeddah will not be enough, targeted interventions will be needed on the set-up to allow Max to get closer to the Monegasque.

“We need to make improvements. The car isn't that bad. But Leclerc has set a pace that requires us to do a lot of fine-tuning on our set-up. I think that, in general, it is necessary to say that the grid is getting closer.”

A joke couldn't be missed about the moment Red Bull is going through after the Horner case: “Things are calming down, thank God. In the end everything will go back to how it was before”, concluded the Red Bull consultant.