The first day of practice shows Ferrari as the third strongest team behind the usual McLaren and Red Bull, but with a good advantage over Mercedes, who are struggling to find a good balance between downforce and speed on the straights. In fact, the highest-placed Ferrari finished fourth, about 0.55 seconds off the top, while the best of the two Silver Arrows finished in sixth place, more than a second behind the leading McLaren.
While Charles Leclerc hasn’t hidden that the two MCL38s are currently out of reach, the hope is at least to get ahead of the two Mercedes cars, and then battle with Max Verstappen, who will start outside the top ten due to a ten-place penalty. Max Verstappen’s single-lap times are certainly more convincing, placing him in the fight for the front row, while his long-run pace is more inconsistent, due not only to traffic but also to an issue that suddenly caused his lap times to increase by more than a second, rising from the low 49s to over a minute and 50 seconds.
According to Charles Leclerc, however, reading today’s performance is even more difficult than usual because many teams followed different plans. For example, the Monegasque driver himself followed a different program from his rivals, using two sets of soft tires instead of just one like almost all his competitors, thus saving a set of medium tires. A strategy copied only by Lando Norris, probably aware that rain is expected tomorrow, so teams will inevitably save a set of soft tires anyway.
“It was a difficult day to understand, with different conditions and different tires. Everyone was on a different program. It’s been hard to understand Fridays with this generation of cars for a couple of years, but today it’s even harder,” the Ferrari driver added.
Clearly, looking ahead to the rest of the weekend, Charles Leclerc knows that, like many other teams, Ferrari will have to choose which direction to go in terms of downforce. For example, today Mercedes tried two rear wings, one very low downforce and one higher downforce, useful for solving the balance problems encountered by Lewis Hamilton.
The main risk, however, is the rain: a wet track is expected for Saturday, while on Sunday, race day, the weather is expected to be more favorable, with a dry track. A high downforce setup could be beneficial on a wet track but could be a double-edged sword in dry conditions. “We need to focus on finding the best compromise, because tomorrow will probably be wet while Sunday will be dry. We’ll think about it, we’ll look for the best compromise.”
As expected, even at Spa, Ferrari is further behind the two benchmark teams, Red Bull and McLaren, although one of the RB20s will have to serve a penalty. The focus has thus shifted directly to the Woking team: according to Charles Leclerc, there’s not a single point where the MCL38 has an edge over the SF-24, but rather a global performance advantage across various sections of the track. From what was seen on the first day, Ferrari manages to be more incisive in the first corners of the second sector but then suffers in much of the rest of the track, including the straights, although this could also be a matter of engine mappings.
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