The Ferrari you don’t expect. The Maranello was able to hit back in the qualifying session for the Abu Dhabi GP after a somewhat difficult free practice in which the actual potential of the F1-75 did not emerge. The F1-75 is no longer the best car on the grid as it was at the beginning of the championship, but although the Scuderia was the first among the top teams to end the development of its car, the gap against the competition is not as big as it was in Mexico.
Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz will start from the second row tomorrow: Max Verstappen seems uncatchable and if he manages to start from the front he will watch everyone in the mirrors, while Sergio Perez was only 0.040 ahead of the Monegasque, a sign that the game for second place in the drivers’ championship is open , very open…
The first fact that emerges from Saturday in Yas Marina is that the Scuderia is a solid team: the rumors over the future of Mattia Binotto have not affected the team and Ferrari remained fullly focused on the race weekend.
The car that took to the track in free practice was certainly not the most competitive: too much aerodynamic load in the rear wing and little performance in terms of race pace on Friday, so much so that Red Bull and Mercedes seemed far ahead.
It’s not the first time in this second part of the season that the F1-75 has struggled to find the ideal setup, but from Friday to Saturday there was a lot of work that led the F1-75 to return to the track with a different setup: in free practice 3 we saw a much more convincing long run with both drivers, a sign that they were aiming for the result in the race, ignoring the flying lap.
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In Maranello, the possibility of using a more extreme engine map in qualifying was taken into consideration, making the most of all the power that the 066/7 is able to bring out, but which is too often limited due to reliability fears and possible technical failures.
In Abu Dhabi we saw a Ferrari that used the wing from the Canada/Silverstone configuration which proved to be close to the performance of the Red Bull RB18: the gap dropped to a couple of kilometers per hour in the two long straights, even with the DRS open.
The Scuderia, therefore, has decided to go on the attack both to defend the second place in the Constructors from Mercedes, and to bring Charles Leclerc ahead of Sergio Perez for the role of vice-world champion.
The feeling is that Ferrari is planning to get the best result possible by aiming for a two-stop race in which the drivers will not have to worry a lot about managing the tires if they get get them into the right operating window, as happened on Saturday morning with temperatures around ten degrees higher to those that will be seen during the GP.
If the F1-75 confirms during the pace we saw in the long run, it can aspire to achieve the two goals in has set. Charles Leclerc was able to impress with his lap times: although he experienced a greater deterioration of the tyrrs compared to the Red Bulls, the Monegasque was the fastest in the last sector, putting his own skills into it with his driving.
Charles admitted to making a couple of mistakes in turns 6 and 7 which were caused by the desire to force the brakes, after covering an initial part of track which was perfectly comparable to that of poleman Verstappen, but today his car is not the RB18.
Carlos Sainz gave his best in the first run of Q3 but then he was able to improve by just a few thousandths. Still, having two Ferrari cars on the second row is a guarantee that the Maranello team has the potential to end the season with a result that restores enthusiasm and motivation to a group which has to face a long winter with the aim of coming back stronger and challenging Red Bull and Mercedes for the 2023 Formula One championships.
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