What’s happened at Ferrari? Bleak outlook for the Scuderia at Belgian Grand Prix

Ferrari are struggling to wrap their heads around their wavering form with Charles Leclerc’s time in Friday’s practice at Spa almost six-tenths off the pace.

P4 and P5 is not a poor result, but a closer look at Friday’s timesheet from practice for the Belgian Grand Prix shows a huge deficit between Ferrari’s lead driver and the P1 time.

Ferrari: A very difficult day to understand

Leclerc was the quicker to the team-mates but still finished 0.577s slower than the McLaren of Lando Norris with Carlos Sainz a further two-tenths down on his team-mate.

The 26-year-old admitted Ferrari were struggling to understand their deficit.

“A very difficult day to understand, to be honest,” Leclerc said after the session.

“A lot of difference of pace in different conditions and different tyres as well, so everybody was on a different plan.

“It’s been quite a few years now that it’s difficult to understand the picture on the Friday with those generation of cars, but today is even more so difficult.”

The numbers that matter ahead of the Belgian GP

👉 F1 2024: Head-to-head race statistics between team-mates

👉 The updated Drivers’ and Constructors’ standings after the Hungarian Grand Prix

Only reaching the podium once in the five Grands Prix since Leclerc’s Monaco Grand Prix victory, Ferrari have been forced to roll back on the Spanish GP upgrades that brought bouncing back to the SF-24.

Losing second place in the Constructors’ Championship with McLaren 16 points ahead after Oscar Piastri’s British GP victory that topped a 1-2 finish, Leclerc says Ferrari can only focus on their own progress.

“We’ve got to focus on ourselves,” insisted Leclerc. “Try to find the right compromise between tomorrow which will be probably wet and Sunday when it will be dry, but we are on it.

“We still have quite a lot of meetings to go through and hopefully we find the best compromise for tomorrow and Sunday.

“Unfortunately we are just struggling compared to McLaren especially, it’s a little bit everywhere.

“We don’t have any magical solution, but we’ll give our best. It’s the last race before the holidays, so I hope we can finish on a high.”

As for Sainz, he called his Friday a “very different start to what we’re used to.

“Since they’ve done the resurface around the whole track, there is a lot more grip and there is a lot more things to learn on this new surface, a lot more graining also on the tyres so it makes the degradation more tricky and less controllable, so I think it’s going to be giving us Formula 1 teams and drivers some headaches.”

But ahead of a wet qualifying session, or so the Spa forecast says, the Spaniard added: “It looks like it’s going to be a wet qualifying, but at the same time it also said it was going to rain all day today and it didn’t, so [I’m] open-minded.

“The weather here is always unpredictable and we will just need to adapt to whatever comes.”

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