By the end of Friday practice for the 2022 Spanish Grand Prix at the Circuit de Catalunya in Barcelona, Scuderia Ferrari has accumulated plenty of data to analyse and the conclusions so far are that the F1-75 car performs very strong over a single lap, while there is still room for improvement in other areas, including race pace, due to the tyre degradation which seemed quite high during the second free practice session in Spain, both for Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz.
However, at the end of the second hour of free practice in Spain, Scuderia Ferrari did not show great concern for the issues encountered on this first day at the Circuit de Catalunya, as reported by Piergiuseppe Donadoni and Paolo D’Alessandro for formu1a.uno. There was the awareness that, with the introduction of such an important package of updates, something might not go in the right direction with some extra work after FP2 which was therefore estimated. Most importantly, however, the update package brought to the track appears to have given the expected indications: “The updates have worked, I am very happy for this, we have found more performance but at the same time in FP2 we have been slower and therefore we have to find the feeling we had this morning. Here, compared to the pre-season testing session, they are all faster and this makes everything more interesting” – said Carlos Sainz at the end of FP2. Therefore not an update problem, but a setup problem, which should be fixed for Saturday.
Even Ferrari Sporting Director Laurent Mekies was not too worried as he talked about an “important potential” of the F1-75 car that would seem to exist, as well as the hypotheses on the problem that generated this disappointing tire management in the race simulation which was completed in the final part of the second free practice. In such cases, the technicians do not take everything negatively since having a visible problem on the degradation can allow to discard some aggressive parameters in terms of setup.
As for the race, Pirelli expects two stops. “The left front tire was the most stressed one,” explained Mario Isola. Which tires will be used? The medium would seem the best compound to do two stints, keeping the Softs for a third possible pit. For now the Hard would seem too slow, 2.4 slower than the Soft and 1.2 from the Mediums.
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The Maranello team and drivers face a busy evening to work out how to make the most of the F1-75’s potential at the Circuit de Catalunya in Barcelona. They will analyse all the data to seek a set-up that will be competitive for both tomorrow’s qualifying and most importantly Sunday’s Grand Prix, round six of the 2022 Formula One season.
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