Charles Leclerc says he believes Ferrari had a similarly strong start to the Mexico City Grand Prix weekend and can keep up with struggling Max Verstappen in race trim, but that McLaren may be out of reach.
Leclerc led the session in FP1 with nine rookies taking part, but in FP2 Verstappen, who was absent for the first hour, set the fastest time in one lap. Leclerc believes that his race pace compared to Red Bull looked competitive, but points out that McLaren’s higher fuel pace is particularly strong.
“Friday was a positive day,” Leclerc said. “We’re still behind, especially compared to Red Bull when they’re low on fuel and McLaren when they’re high on fuel. It’s not surprising. We expected them to be the strongest team coming here, but we did a pretty good lap.
“The car felt pretty good. We’ll just build on that tomorrow and hope we can perform a little bit better.”
“We may have been a little bit better compared to Red Bull when they were high on fuel, but McLaren were much more in a league of their own, so I don’t know exactly what’s going on there. I hope they’re low on fuel, but I don’t know.
“They look very strong, so it doesn’t seem realistic to race together at the moment, but we would like to make changes to get closer to them.”
Leclerc was second in FP2, with teammate Lewis Hamilton also in the top five, but the seven-time world champion was also not satisfied with the handling of his car.
“I’m surprised it’s relatively close considering it didn’t feel very good,” Hamilton said. “So every time I come here, the grip…because of the altitude, it feels lower than at Monza even though everyone is running with quite a lot of downforce. I’m sliding around trying to find grip and it’s not there.
“The balance is very open. We have a lot of work to do throughout the night to find a way to find a more reasonable balance.
“We’ll look at the data tonight and come up with some plans, but we definitely don’t want to race like today. The long run balance wasn’t disastrous, but it’s important to get more out of the tires. We know the car has more pace.”
Verstappen supported Leclerc’s opinion that Red Bull lacked race pace at this stage of the weekend, saying his only strength was in the qualifying simulation.
“I was looking forward to this day a little bit, but I think I did a good lap on the soft in the short run,” Verstappen said. “The rest, everything else was pretty bad. On the mediums, the short runs weren’t great, but the big problem seems to be that we’re struggling quite a bit on the long runs. Of course, that’s a big concern for the race.”
“We weren’t out of balance, we just didn’t have grip, and that’s the bigger concern. As soon as you start driving sustainably, the tires get hot. Yeah, they were out of nowhere. That’s a tough problem to solve, too, but let’s see.”
“You can’t win a race in those conditions. You might be fast in one lap, but if you have no pace at all in the race, it’s going to be very tough. I like to be fast in a race, but not so fast in a lap.”
For McLaren, it was Lando Norris who looked more comfortable despite missing FP1, but given the early fuel shortage, he is wary of how many other teams could pose a threat.
“I think we’re certainly in a reasonable position,” Norris said. “I actually felt like I got up to speed pretty quickly. I was pretty surprised. The first lap was pretty good and the second lap was a good step.”
“I felt like we found our limit right away…that’s just holding us back a little bit. It’s not like we had a bad day, but normally on Friday we’re really good and on Saturday everyone catches up. We’re already a little bit behind, so we definitely have some work to do tonight.”
“They fixed it (the power surge) right away. It’s just that the balance of the car is a little off. It’s the same single-lap issue as it has been the last few weeks. We’re struggling at the moment, so we’re working hard. We’re trying everything we can, so we’ll see what we can do and see what we can find.”