Ferrari is using the next two races in Austria as a “test opportunity” to find answers to the tyre woes that wrecked their French Grand Prix, according to Carlos Sainz.
While the Italian team had strong single lap pace at Circuit Paul Ricard a week ago, on race day, extreme front tyre graining dropped both drivers outside the points, leading to Ferrari’s first non-score of 2021.
After the race, team boss Mattia Binotto admitted the problem wasn’t new for the Scuderia, even stemming back to F1’s last trip to France back in 2019.
And now Ferrari is taking action, hoping a pair of Grands Prix at the Red Bull Ring could offer solutions.
“We are approaching this as a bit of a test opportunity because we’ll be spending six days of running here in two weeks, it’s going to give us the opportunity to, back-to-back, get a lot of data,” Sainz, who spun in both sessions on Friday, explained.
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“We always have next week to correct the bad direction, but at the same time, we still want to optimise every weekend. We’re still fighting for P3 in the [Constructors’] Championship.
“We said right from the beginning that this is going to be a mid-to-long-term issue to solve, not one race, all of sudden, back to being right with the front tyres.
“It (practice) was challenging because obviously you lose a bit of focus on the full performance running and you put it a bit more into trying to understand the car.
“But hopefully by qualifying time, we will put everything back to where we want it to be and we will get some answers.”
Compared to Paul Ricard, the Red Bull Ring is more balanced in terms of tyre wear with three traction zones to start followed by the medium and high-speed corners in the second half of the lap.
While that might make finding direct solutions to what occurred in France tougher for Ferrari, Sainz still believes it is possible.
“It is more difficult, but our issue is so obvious that it is easy to see it on our tyres regardless of the circuit that we go to,” he said.
“It is a positive thing but realistically also clearly a negative thing because we clearly have a weakness there that we are trying to address at every circuit we go to.”
So far, however, it appears the search for answers is largely drawing a blank.
“We are trying different things on both cars,” Charles Leclerc said. “For now, we are learning quite a bit.
“Whether we have a solution for what happened in France – not yet – but we have been trying a lot of things which have been very useful for the team, in different aspects.
“Hopefully soon enough, we’ll be finding the real solution for the problem that happened in France.”
Despite Ferrari’s alternative focus on Friday, results were still solid with both cars on the fringes of the top 10 in both sessions.