Back on good saturday form

Scuderia Ferrari has refound the qualifying form it had at the start of the season. After an encouraging first attempt in yesterday’s Sprint Qualifying, today Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz were front runners in what was a very close fight throughout the grid order for tomorrow’s Miami Grand Prix which gets underway tomorrow at 16.00 local (22 CEST). Charles repeated his second place performance from Friday behind pole man Max Verstappen, while Carlos was third, a result that was probably also within his grasp yesterday. 

Q3. The field had to deal with rather tricky grip conditions with variable winds and particularly high track temperatures. Leclerc and Sainz were already impeccable in Q1 and Q2, doing an excellent job of managing the tyres and setting very competitive lap times even on used tyres. They therefore both comfortably made it through to the final phase for which they had two sets of new Softs. On his first run Charles did a 1’27”382, while Carlos stopped the clocks in 1’27”455, which put them second and third behind Verstappen. These three and several other drivers were unable to improve on their second runs so the order remained unchanged.

Sprint Race. At 12 on the dot this morning, (18 CEST), the Sprint Race got underway, which was useful for all teams to acquire information relating to race pace for tomorrow. The Ferraris started on new Medium tyres and Charles narrowly missed getting ahead of Verstappen off the line. Carlos stayed fifth and he just could not find a way past Daniel Ricciardo in fourth place, despite fighting tooth and nail with the Australian all the way to the chequered flag. So they finished where they started, Leclerc second and Sainz fifth, thus bringing home Scuderia Ferrari HP’s first 12 points for this brand new title partnership. 

Charles Leclerc #16

I was happy with the car, we didn't change much since this morning, just did a bit of fine tuning, but overall we are in a good place. It was tricky to put together the lap and not many of us improved on that last timed lap in Q3, so P2 on the grid is not a bad result and we will push to fight for the win tomorrow. 

In the Sprint race I had quite a good start and then was on the inside for turn 1, but I didn't want to take too many risks because of qualifying coming up later in the day. Both Max (Verstappen) and I braked late and eventually he kept his position but it was a good test and I’m looking forward to tomorrow.

Carlos Sainz #55

Overall we cannot be too disappointed with the result today. This track is always very tricky, slippery in some sectors and with the tyres on the verge of overheating. We are in a good position to fight with the Red Bulls and we’ll do everything we can to make the most of it in the race. Looking forward to tomorrow!

Fred Vasseur Team Principal Scuderia Ferrari HP

Overall, it’s a good result, starting P2 and P3 with Red Bull P1 and P4. However, there’s a slight feeling of frustration as we had hoped to get a better result, but it was clear that everyone was finding it difficult to put a lap together in this session on the Softs. Everyone was right on the edge and if you pushed too hard it was easy to go over the limit. Today, as was already the case yesterday, our preparation for the flying laps went well. 

For tomorrow, let’s wait and see: it looks like our race pace is a bit slower than Max’s (Verstappen) so the most important thing will be to get a good first lap and make use of the DRS that is very strong at this track. After that, a lot will depend on tyre degradation on which we have collected some data from today’s Sprint Race. We brought home 12 points so it was not that bad, but the real points will be given out tomorrow and we’ll try our best.