Ferrari delay new floor to avoid driver favouritism

Jamie Woodhouse
Charles Leclerc leads Carlos Sainz Ferrari

Ferraritested a new floor during Friday practice in Portugal, but to avoid playing favourites, won’t use it again until Barcelona.

The Scuderia have brought only one of these experimental floors with them to Portimao, andMotorsport.comreport that the feedback was positive fromCharles Leclerc.

The Monegasque finished P4 in the opening Portuguese GP practice session using it, going only 0.236s slower than Valtteri Bottas who topped the session.

However, we won’t see it put into action again until the Spanish Grand Prix next weekend as Ferrari reportedly did not want to show favouritism between the drivers by using it for the rest of the sessions in Portugal.

Instead, they are going to wait until both Leclerc and Carlos Sainz have the update available to them in Barcelona.

‘The Prancing Horse were only able to prepare one updated base, so it won’t be used at the weekend to avoid favouritism between drivers, but we’ll see in Spain,’the report from the Italian branch of Motorsport.com stated.

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团队的决定将由足总更加容易ct that, without the new floor, Sainz still managed to secure P4 in FP2.

“It was a positive day for me,” he said as perSky Italia.

“Today we had probably the lowest grip of the season. This is the third different track with different conditions. In Bahrain, there were certain conditions, in Imola others and here different again.

“It’s another good day for me, the tyres behaved differently but we have similar times [to what we expected] and that’s good.

“We have to understand the relationship between the tyre and the car, how to warm it up, and these are the main aspects to work on ahead of qualifying”.

Leclerc meanwhile ended the afternoon session in P7 and wasn’t as happy with his performance on the long runs in particular.

“Today the qualifying simulation was positive,” he said.

“We went well also with the long runs. Not great to tell the truth from my side, it was the weak point and I have to work on it for tomorrow.

“Carlos did well though so we have good feedback from the team.”

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