Ferrari not surprised by lack of speed at Zandvoort

Having struggled for pace on the opening day at the Dutch Grand Prix, Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc has revealed that he was not surprised by the lack of speed on the narrow, old-school Zandvoort circuit.

Charles Leclerc completed a tricky opening session, ending it down in P13. He was able to improve his position in FP2, but he was still down in P9, almost a second off the benchmark time.

While the SF-24 was fairly competitive down the long straights, it lacked pace in the sequence of medium-speed corners which is something Ferrari had expected coming into the first race after the summer break.

"It was tough, as expected I would say. We don’t quite match the pace of our competitors in front, but I think it’s better than what it looks like on the timesheets today. We have work to do in order to be in a place where we can fight for the win.

"I will do everything to extract the maximum in qualifying, but the gaps we are looking at for the moment are too big to do anything special.

The six-time F1 race winner does not expect Ferrari to be in contention for top spots, but he still hopes that the Scuderia can close the enormous deficit to the field-lead leading Mercedes and McLaren for the remainder of the weekend.

"If we can get to within 2 to 3 tenths, then maybe we can fight for a good spot in qualifying, otherwise I predict a difficult weekend for us," concluded the Monegasque.

His team-mate Carlos Sainz displayed a fairly encouraging performance in the opening sixty-minute practice, but he spent the majority of the second practice in the garage.

The Spaniard kicked off FP2 on Pirelli's medium tyres, but just after seven laps, he was forced to pit after a suspected gearbox issue which the team was unable to solve during the session.

"Today was not an easy day. This morning, due to bad weather, we weren’t able to run properly and unfortunately during FP2 we had a problem with the gearbox in the first run, so overall I couldn’t do many laps.

"Tomorrow we’ll try to make up for the time lost and build confidence around the track. We have work to do to close the gap to the top."