"Not a great day for Ferrari," reckons Leclerc

On the back of his impressive showing and a second-place finish at last year's Las Vegas Grand Prix, Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc has acknowledged that the Scuderia is not as strong as expected to be on the challenging street circuit of Nevada.

Ferrari were favourites coming into the Las Vegas Grand Prix weekend, but the opening day indicated that the Italian team will have a more difficult weekend that many had anticipated.

Charles Leclerc was on pole at Las Vegas last season, but it looks like it could be a four-team battle for that P1 grid slot tomorrow. The Monegasque ended up fourth in the first session, but struggled for pace on the softs in the second practice to end up only fifth almost half a second adrift of his future team-mate Lewis Hamilton.

Reflecting on his day, the eight-time F1 race winner claimed that the cold weather conditions affected the SF24 more than the team had hoped beforehand.

"It was not a great day for us and it seems to have been tricky for everyone else as well. We are not as strong as we expected to be coming into the weekend.

"With the cold weather conditions, it was difficult to bring the tyres up to temperature, which we knew would be a challenge, so we will work on that. Let’s see what we can do tomorrow."

His team-mate Carlos Sainz had a busy first day as he ran an experimental floor in the opening practice. The team equipped the Spaniard's car with the standard version for the second practice, with the Scuderia's senior engineer Jock Clear claiming that the modified floor was only tried out for wind tunnel correlation.

The Madrid-born driver ended up sixth in Free Practice 2, but he had a sizeable deficit to the pace-setter Lewis Hamilton. However, he managed to display a more promising pace in the second one-hour practice, ending up fourth with just a couple of tenths behind the Briton.

"A complicated Thursday here in Vegas due to a challenging track with very low grip which gave us a strange feeling inside the car. For FP2 we tried something different but we are still not satisfied with where we are and we need to keep working on it.

"Hopefully the analysis tonight will help in finding our biggest areas of improvement and we can get to Qualifying in better shape. Race pace wasn’t too bad, but there’s still a lot to do," Sainz added.