If Charles Leclerc smiles, Carlos Sainz instead ended the first day on the track with a dark face. The Ferrari driver concluded Free Practice 2 in Monte-Carlo with an anonymous sixth place, almost 7 tenths behind the time reference set by his teammate.
Leclerc immediately appeared at ease at the wheel of the SF-24 from the first lap of Free Practice 1, while Carlos Sainz admitted that he struggled all day, especially in Free Practice 2, when he realized that the changes made on his Red did not they were at all productive neither for the flying lap nor for the race pace.
“Today we definitely struggled on the flying lap. We just weren’t able to extract the maximum performance from the soft one-lap average. And then, for some reason, on the long runs we struggled and we saw it very quickly, so yeah, there is something to understand, but I hope that by tomorrow we will find some answers.”
Carlos Sainz, Ferrari SF-24
Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images
And it is precisely the race pace that worries Sainz the most, although Monte-Carlo presents such a narrow track for the current single-seaters that today’s qualifying sessions are fundamental for the final result of the weekend, barring sensational twists for drivers who eventually start in front .
“We got a little lost with the set-up changes at the start of FP2, which caused me to fall a little behind throughout FP2 and I seemed to recover a little too late in the long run, so I hope to improve for qualifying, but it wasn’t the ideal start to the weekend. I hope I’ll be in better shape tomorrow.”
“Monaco has always been one of the tracks where I’ve done best, which is why what happened today is strange. At the same time, when I see that I’m probably the slowest in terms of race pace, there’s something to understand and if we put everything into together we should be good for tomorrow”, concluded Sainz.
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