Charles Leclerc is pinning his hopes on better race pace if Ferrari is to challenge McLaren at the Styrian Grand Prix.
With the Scuderia treating this Austria doubleheader as a “test opportunity”, the Monegasque was pretty satisfied after claiming P7 in qualifying.
The problem, his best time was three-tenths down on Lando Norris ahead in 4th, with the Briton finding himself only just off the pace of Mercedes.
“I’m happy about my lap, actually very happy with my lap,” said Leclerc in the paddock.
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“I put everything together, I didn’t do any mistakes and put all of my best corners in one lap.
“But then on the other hand, when looking at the gap in between myself and Lando, I wouldn’t go as far as ‘scary’, but it’s quite a bit.”
While Ferrari has made strong engine gains for this year, Leclerc revealed the main issue still appeared to be optimising straight-line speed performance.
“We don’t completely understand why yet because it’s mostly where we are opening the DRS and the others seem to be a lot stronger with the DRS on,” he explained.
“So it’s not in all the straights, it’s mostly in those three straights. Then overall grip, probably, a little bit, but we are not that bad in the corners actually if you compare to the others.”
While unable to challenge at the head of the midfield in qualifying, the two-time podium finisher in Spielberg is more confident for Sunday.
“We need to work hard for tomorrow. I think that our race pace is better than our quali pace this weekend, which is quite unusual,” he admitted.
“The race pace was very good yesterday [in practice] so we didn’t want to sacrifice the race pace to be better in qualifying today.
“P7 was, I think, the best result we could do today and we will go from there.
“If we have a good race pace then I feel like this can be a strong race for us and a good opportunity to score good points.
“A good start and then hopefully the pace to stay where we will be.”
Meanwhile, teammate Carlos Sainz has more work to do coming through from P12 on the grid.
“We have been fighting to get through [to] Q3 and fighting to be in the top 10 in every practice session, so you can just see the time is not coming as easy as in Paul Ricard,” he conceded.
“The feeling in the car is also not as good as it was there.
“Over one lap we are struggling a bit to unlock the one-lap pace but hopefully, we can reverse that trend and be faster in the race tomorrow.”
