Ferrari have the fastest time after two days of pre-season testing but Charles Leclerc believes they have not significantly closed the gap to Red Bull during the off-season.
“My initial feeling is that Red Bull unfortunately remains quite a bit ahead,” he told the official F1 channel during today’s test.
His team mate Carlos Sainz Jnr set the pace today with a best time of 1’29.921 on the C4 tyre compound. However Max Verstappen was comfortably quickest yesterday, lapping in 1’31.344 on the C3s, more than a second quicker than the competition.
“Yesterday they’ve done very impressive lap times,” Leclerc acknowledged. “But this is only my own feeling, not looking at data, because again, data doesn’t mean much for now.”
“For now, it’s too early to say, we have no idea what are the fuel levels of everybody else,” he added.
Leclerc is encouraged by the improvements Ferrari have made their new SF-24. “In terms of driveability, the car is a lot better compared to last year,” he said.
“Last year, after the test, it was very, very difficult to push into a direction because we just didn’t know what the car was doing. We would get into a corner and we didn’t know whether we will have extreme oversteer or extreme understeer, which was a big problem.
“This year the car is not like that, which is a better starting point.”
That should allow them to address a key weakness of last year’s car. “I think the driveability is going to help us on the long runs,” he said. “I think that for tyre degradation, for race runs overall, I think we should be in a better place.”
Leclerc’s second day in the car was disrupted when he struck a loose drain cover. It damaged the floor of the SF-24 and forced Ferrari to switch to a spare. “It wasn’t huge,” he said. “There was a bit of a hole in the floor which we had to change.
“I had no warning. I saw something, but it was so thin that I thought it was a plastic thing. We see sometimes some of them around the track and we just go on them and nothing is happening. But this time obviously it was metal so it hurt the car a little bit more.”
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