Ferrari suffer from severe graining at Spa-Francorchamps while Pirelli detected cuts in several tyres on Friday

Scuderia Ferrari appeared to be one of the teams that suffered the most from graining on the soft tyres during the opening day of this weekend's Belgian Grand Prix. F1Technical's senior writer Balazs Szabo delivers his tyre analysis.

Max Verstappen was quickest in the first session in a time of 1’43”372, albeit the Dutchman was outpaced in the second practice by Lando Norris who posted a time of 1’42”260. Not only was the Englishman’s time much quicker than the 2022 pole position time of 1’43”655 set by Verstappen, it was also well under the predicted time of 1’42”800. The 2023 event was run to the Sprint format and both qualifying sessions were not comparable to today’s times as the track was wet.

As for the track conditions, rain had been forecast for Friday, but it did materialize. Both sessions were run in reasonably constant climatic conditions, with cloudy skies and track temperatures going from a fraction over 37 °C in FP1 to a low of 30 °C in FP2.

Twelve of the twenty drivers have already used one set of Hard tyres out of the two they can use per race weekend. Only the Mercedes, Ferrari, McLaren and Alpine drivers have kept both sets.

In FP1 and FP2, a few cuts were seen in some tyres, caused by gravel brought onto the track by cars that went through the run-off areas and back onto the track.

Pirelli's chief engineer Simone Berra commented on the first day of running at Spa: “It looks like being a particularly demanding weekend on the tyre front, as in fact was to be expected on a special track like Spa-Francorchamps.

"The fact that large sections of the track have been resurfaced has seen a significant increase in grip which, on the one hand, has made the track much quicker, already by almost 1”4 compared to the pole from two years ago, the last time there was a realistic reference point, while on the other hand it has probably led to an increase in graining, especially on the Medium and Soft and therefore a consequent increase in performance degradation over a long distance. In both sessions, we also saw a marked track evolution.

"As the track is expected to be mainly wet tomorrow and then dry on Sunday, the teams will have to rely on the data gathered today to come up with the best set-up and strategies on a track where it is already more complicated than usual to find the right compromise between the need for aerodynamic downforce to stop the tyres from sliding, especially in the second sector, and maintaining good top speed to be competitive in the quicker first and third sectors.

"Compared to what we saw over the previous two years with this new generation of cars, the C2 seemed to be pretty competitive and could be a valid choice for the race, which explains why four teams have kept two sets for each of their drivers.”

As Berra stressed the new tarmac led to a significant degree of graining on the first day of running. The soft tyres were affected the most by graining while several cars also encountered the issues on the mediums.

On the image of Formula Aerodynamics, it is clear to see that the inner edge of the front soft tyres suffered from severe graining on Ferrari's SF-24. It is therefore not surprising that the Scuderia was among the few teams that stacked up two sets of fresh hards for the remainder of the weekend which indicated that they might avoid using the red-walled tyres on Sunday and might elect to complete the 44-lap Spa race with a set of mediums and two sets of hards.

Reflecting on his day behind the wheel of the SF-24, Carlos Sainz said that there is still plenty for Ferrari to figure out after Friday’s running.

He continued: “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 going into tonight.”

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