Charles Leclerc believes that Ferrari must “do everything perfect” in order to keep the competition at bay for the remaining action in Hungary, where he and team mate Lewis Hamilton exchanged the fastest laps of Friday’s running.
Despite the difficult conditions at the Hungaroring causing drivers to complain about balance and a lack of grip, the Scuderia got off to a flying start as Leclerc topped the times in FP1 from Max Verstappen and Hamilton.
It wasn’t entirely smooth sailing – the Monegasque reported that “something broke” on his car and he ended the session in the pit lane, but the issue was fixed in time for him to once again be in the mix at the front during FP2.
After finishing the afternoon session in second place, 0.148s off Hamilton’s benchmark, Leclerc said: “It was a relatively strong day. From the beginning I felt quite good with the car, and performance seemed to be good straightaway so that’s a good thing.
“The weekend is still long. From Friday to Saturday, we see teams making a jump in performance. Normally we are on the back foot on the Friday so it’s a good thing that we had a good Friday, but we still need to stay on it and work hard in order to get better for tomorrow.
“It’s going to be tight tomorrow as always. I don’t expect us to have the gap that we’ve had today, so we’ll have to do everything perfect. If the feeling is there, I’m sure we’ll do a good job in Q3.”
Ferrari’s closest rivals on Friday – Red Bull’s Verstappen and McLaren’s Lando Norris – both wound up around half a second adrift with the field spread larger than expected, but Team Principal Fred Vasseur was nevertheless wary of assuming their advantage will remain in place.
“It was a bit more messy today in the afternoon in FP2 with traffic, the red flag and so on,” Vasseur said. “So far, the balance is okay.
“That means that we’ll probably see a bit more tomorrow morning with the car a bit more split on track, and it will probably be a bit easier to do a proper lap.
“So far so good but it’s not on Friday that you’re doing pole, and even less that you win the race. It’s good to start the weekend like this but let’s see tomorrow. It will be another story.”
