Federico Albano:
Finally, as far as the Maranello team is concerned, the two SF-24s performed well on track. The impression is that they have no particular performance peaks on the straight or in the corners, but that the set-up considered by the Cavallino engineers was the best compromise for the Baku circuit and the complicated conditions on Friday. Leclerc recorded the best time on the dry lap (although he was helped by the fact that he started later than his rivals) and Sainz recorded the second best average in the race pace simulations, as well as the best overall performance, precisely on the long runs, where he arrived in the last sector with at least a two-tenths advantage over the competition, only to lose Verstappen very slowly on the long straight and be overtaken by Hamilton's Mercedes very quickly on the straight.
This is an indication that the red car was a fundamentally balanced car. The challenge now for Vasseur's engineers and for Sainz and Leclerc is to be able to follow the evolution of the track, which will change significantly as the sessions progress and will require a set-up that knows how to keep pace without losing the precious and delicate balance on which these cars operate. The other challenge for Ferrari will be to find the tyre operating window in qualifying, with temperatures that are not particularly high and a track that puts everyone at a disadvantage from a tyre warm-up point of view, given the lack of strong, sustained lateral acceleration and, at the same time, very long straights that create macroscopic differences between the front end temperatures (which fall) and the rear end temperatures (which rise with traction).
https://www.formulapassion.it/f1/f1-ana ... ove-libere
