"It didn't look too pleasant" - Binotto offers no excuses for Ferrari's shambolic Spa form

Ferrari

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"It didn't look too pleasant" - Binotto offers no excuses for Ferrari's shambolic Spa form

Charles Leclerc and Sebastian Vettel face threat of embarrassing Q1 exit

Ian Parkes

Saturday 29 August 2020 09:10

Ferrari team principal Mattia Binotto has conceded his team faces an uphill struggle to salvage something from the Belgian Grand Prix weekend.

The Scuderia head into qualifying at Spa-Francorchamps facing the embarrassment of one of its cars being knocked out in Q1 a year after locking out the front row of the grid, with Charles Leclerc going on to claim his maiden win from pole position.

In Friday practice, Leclerc and Vettel were also-rans, limping to 15th and 17th, split by Williams' George Russell, whose team-mate Nicholas Latifi was less than a tenth of a second behind the four-time F1 champion.

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"It didn't look too pleasant from the outside - but from the inside as well," assessed Binotto, as Leclerc was 1.7secs off the pace of Red Bull frontrunner Max Verstappen, with Vettel two seconds adrift.

"Certainly we were not competitive, both in FP1 and FP2. We struggled to make the tyres work, lacking grip in both braking and acceleration. It gave no overall performance to the car and the drivers complained about overall grip.

"That's not the potential of our car, not the normal position of our car, if you compare where we [normally] are on the grid and [with] relative competitiveness to the others."

It is understood Binotto and his team burned the midnight oil in a bid to understand and analyse the data, in particular why the SF1000 was unable to bring the tyres into the right temperature window.

"It's the same situation with both cars, it's not driver related," added Binotto, exonerating Leclerc and Vettel of any blame.

"There is a lot to do to try to address it for the rest of the weekend."

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